


Fratros, Eros and Agape

by emma221b



Series: Fratros, Eros and Agape [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Hospitals, Major Character Injury, Medical, Multi, Serious Injuries, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2016-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-09 13:03:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 64,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1146328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emma221b/pseuds/emma221b
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When John Watson found Sherlock Holmes lying shot and bleeding on the floor of Charles Augustus Magnussen's office, he had no idea of the events that would turn his life upside down in the following months. </p><p>Missing scenes from His Last Vow, seen from John's point of view.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Rated M for language and some of the more gorey medical details. Probably not a story for the squeamish! I've also gone for medical accuracy over the finer details in the episode on the rare occasions that I couldn't make the two coincide (Sherlock's teeny, tiny thoracostomy scar after emergency thoracic surgery, for example).

John didn't hear the shot; silenced of course, the intruder must have been a professional after all. What he noticed instead was - complete silence. No footsteps, no sound, no voices. Where was Sherlock, and what could possibly be taking him this long?

Janine was awake now, sitting up, starting to talk sense, although he suspect she was mildly concussed. She kept on asking where Sherlock was, and what he was doing. John was asking himself the same question, but memories of Soo Lin, gunned down while he had run off to find her attacker, prevented him from leaving Janine to find out. A rustle from the other side of the room alerted him to the fact that the security guard, who looked like an even shadier character awake than he had unconscious, was awake too, and the next thing he knew, an alarm was sounded, and he was almost blinded by brightness as the lights came blazing on at full power. The security guard had obviously pushed his panic button. John should have thought of that, and taken his alarm away from him when he had checked him for breathing earlier. More company was the last thing that they needed.

''Tell him I'm one of the good guys, will you, Janine?' John said, as the security guard staggered to his feet.

'Ted, this is John. He's a friend of mine,' Janine said, rubbing her head, still sounding dazed. John had no idea what she'd been hit with, but she had quite a lump on her head already, quite enough to explain her semi-concussed state.

Ted grunted, although John suspected that this was more his normal level of conversation than a sequelae of his head injury. 'Shut off those alarms will you?' John hissed, 'if the intruder is still here, we don't want to make them bolt.' Janine reached for the phone and moments later, the alarms shut off as quickly as they'd started.

'Thank you,' John said, shaking his head in an attempt to stop his ears ringing. 'Now keep an eye on Janine will you?' he instructed the security guard as he ran towards the stairs, trying to remember which way Sherlock had gone. Up the stairs he knew, but there were two more floors above this one, so where was he? Think, John. All the doors on the first level up were closed, so he continued on up the next flight of stairs. A man with Magnussen's ego would accept nothing less than the penthouse for his office, he reasoned. Going with his instincts he carried on up. At the end of the corridor, a door stood ajar, a figure was slumped on the floor directly ahead. White shirt, light grey trousers, too stocky to be Sherlock. Magnussen? Had the intruder got to him too?

Cursing Sherlock for forbidding him from bringing his pistol, or even a tyre iron, John stationed himself behind the door, back to the wall, peering round it as quietly as he could to see who else was in the room. There was another figure lying on his back to the right of the door, in front of a large mirror. His head was turned away, but John recognised Sherlock instantly, and throwing caution aside, ran across to him.

He checked for breathing, then shook his friend, and when that failed to provoke a response, slapped his face lightly. There was no external evidence of head injury that he could see, but Magnussen was stirring now and clutching his head, so he could only assume that Sherlock had received the same treatment.

'What happened?' he asked Magnussen.

'Someone shot him,' came the calm reply. Trying to push aside the panic, John opened Sherlock's coat to reveal the red stain on the front of his shirt. Cold panic flooded through him, but he forced his brain into action. Right side of the chest, not the left. Thank fuck for that. But too close to the midline for his liking. Right ventricle, IVC, lung, pulmonary vessel, spinal cord. No, not that, please God, not that, anything but that. If he survived, but was paralysed, then how the hell would Sherlock cope with that?

He felt for a pulse with one hand - weak, thready, but palpable, while dialling 999 with the other. He could feel Magnussen watching him as he gave the details and the address to the call handler. Those cold, calculating eyes. Taking it all in, recording John's reaction for future use. What would his papers say tomorrow John wondered. Something about the love of John Watson for Sherlock Holmes? That would be all they needed - to have those old rumors reignited.

Odd how hard he was finding it to focus, to ignore Magnussen's enquiring glance, to focus on doing what he could for Sherlock. Should he move him? He was an army doctor, for fucks sake, and yet all of his training had deserted him under that reptilian stare.

'Go and let them in,' he snapped at the man, not attempting to conceal his contempt.

'I'm sorry?' this was obviously not a man used to receiving orders.

'The paramedics, go and let them in. They won't be able to get past your bloody security will they? Go and let them in.'

'And I should do that because?'

'Because if you don't, then I'll fucking kill you myself,' John hissed.

And something in his tone must have made Magnussen pay attention, because he left the room with a shrug.

Concentrate, John. Battlefield ATLS, drilled into him so many times. C comes first on the battlefield. Circulation, stop the bleeding. The external bleeding was a trickle only, although he had to rip Sherlock's shirt open to confirm that, the main bleeding would be internal he knew. Pressure on the wound might dislodge a bullet further, causing more damage, better to leave that alone. Sherlock's pulse was climbing, 140 now at the carotid, his radial pulse impalpable, blood pressure less than 70 systolic then. Fuck. He felt like howling in frustration, he had no kit, not even his GP bag. He would have cut off his own arm to give Sherlock his blood if he could have got it into him, but there was nothing that he could do.

Back to the beginning then - A for airway - patent, fast irregular breaths, with no signs of obstruction. That was something. B was for breathing, respiratory rate of forty, but both sides of the chest moving equally when he palpated it; so no pneumothorax - not yet anyway. Should he be putting something over the wound? Stop an open pneumothorax developing? The wound was small, less than two thirds of the diameter of the trachea was the old mantra wasn't it? He couldn't remember. What was wrong with him? Here he was, a doctor, and he was fucking useless. He started to shake as the adrenaline coursed through him. On the battlefield he would have known what to do. He would have had a role, he would have had a kit bag. An Asherman seal to put over the wound, two large bore cannulas and hang the fluid bags; get someone else to squeeze them, air evac the patient to base camp or better still to the ED at Camp Bastion where there would have been a full team waiting, and eight units of blood ready and waiting on the rapid infuser. Fuck, he hoped the receiving hospital would be ready for them. Where would they take him? The Royal London he hoped, best trauma centre in the city. If anyone could save Sherlock then they could.

He heard voices downstairs and footsteps coming towards them, crikey they had been fast. Sherlock was looking waxen now, sweat standing out on his forehead. Panicking slightly, John felt for his pulse. It was still there, but fainter and more rapid than ever. Then the paramedics were running into the room and his training clicked in.

He gave a rapid handover while an oxygen mask was applied, ripping open the cannula packet with his teeth and sliding the cannula into where he knew the vein should be, while the technician ran the fluid from the bag into the giving set; swearing slightly at the lack of flashback, then realising that the flashback was just painfully slow because Sherlock was so shut down. Attaching the fluid to the line, snapping at the paramedic that now wasn't the time for careful fluid administration in a patient who was close to exsanguinating. The first clot might be the best clot, but any fluid was better than arresting from hypovolemia. Pour it in, try to get his blood pressure to a level which would stop him from going into cardiac arrest, that was the priority now.

The paramedic looked at him and nodded at his snapped explanation. 'I served in Hellmand, and before that in Iraq. I'm not telling you how to do your job, but I've seen more gunshot wounds than you've had hot dinners, and I'm telling you that we've got about twenty minutes before this man arrests. So unless you want to crack a chest in the back of your ambulance, I suggest that we scoop and run. Now.'

And scoop and run they did. Onto the trolley, and running with Sherlock to the lift, strapping him in as they went, squeezing the bags of fluid as hard as they could during the seemingly endless trip down in the lift, then running with him into the ambulance, clicking the wheels of the trolley into the locks as the technician started the engine, and the sirens screamed into life as they pulled out into the traffic.

'Don't you fucking die on me, you bastard,' John murmured to his friend, as they weaved through the London streets, and he was thrown from one side of the ambulance to the other, being forced to brace himself with one arm against the side of the trolley. 'Don't you dare die on me, not again. I couldn't bear it. You hear me, Sherlock? You hold on.'

He pushed to the back of his mind the sickening realisation that if Sherlock's heart did stop, then he was the only one here who could do a resuscitative thoracotomy. Could he? Would he? They said that you never forgot. He'd only had to do one in his career as an army medic, out in the field. He'd witnessed others, but there had always been more experienced surgeons there to do the honors.

His one experience had been with a nineteen year old squaddie, out on his first tour, fresh out of training. He'd been shot by a sniper out on patrol, and John had been on the retrieval team who had gone out to get him. The boy had arrested in the helicopter ten minutes out from Camp Bastion, and John had done what he had been trained to do. Clamshell incision from the sternum spreading laterally both sides at the level of the fifth intercostal space, pair of trauma scissors to cut through the sternum, his hands shaking with effort, not with nerves. He had been doing what he was trained to do, what he had practised so many times on pig carcasses in the army training centre before he had been deployed. Through the sternum, suction out the blood - so much blood, how much blood could a human body hold? Pen torch held between his teeth, desperately trying to get a clear view, getting the medic in the helicopter cabin with him to hold the suction with one hand while starting internal compressions with the other, while he grabbed the scalpel, trying to hold it steady against the judder of the helicopter, seeing the hole, slicing through the surprisingly tough and fibrous pericardium to get rid of the blood surrounding the heart, finding the hole ripped through the left ventricle, knowing that he couldn't stop this, couldn't save this man, but not wanting to give up, not now. Continuing to squeeze the heart which took longer and longer to fill, watching the blood turn from dark red to rose as it was diluted by the fluid that they were pouring in. Watching the same fluid disappearing into the suction bag until it was full, switching to a second suction bag, and knowing that the majority of the five litres of blood that this man, this boy, had contained was now in that bag, and not where it needed to be.

He had continued squeezing that heart until they got him into the trauma bay of the ER, to the waiting trauma team; the blood on the rapid infuser, the waiting cardiothoracic surgeon. He had known that it was hopeless, but he had had to try none the less. The team had run for a full twenty minutes, while the cardiothoracic surgeon put in a temporary stitch to close the hole, while they poured ten, twenty, thirty units of blood into the boy, but he was dead. And nothing that they could do would bring him back.

It wasn't the worst injury that he had seen on his three operational tours as a frontline medic, but it was the one that had stayed with him the longest. That feeling of futility, of helplessness, was what had stopped him from pursuing a career in surgery. He didn't like being the last reserve, didn't like knowing that it was him or nothing. General practice suited him better. Even on that rare occasion when an emergency arose, there were usually colleagues around to back you up. And when there weren't, the paramedics were always eight minutes away or less. They had the detachment that John found that he now lacked. His own brush with death after his injury in Hellmand had left him with the odd feeling that the protective layer that he had built up over all those years had been stripped away, leaving his nerve endings exposed. He remembered being horrified as a student at the level of detachment displayed by those on the sharp end; at the black humor that enabled medical staff to laugh in the face of death. It was a defence, he had discovered. Because if you sat down and thought about all the horrors that you had seen, you would end up gibbering in the corner, and that didn't help you or the patient. Better to push it to one side, to crack inappropriate jokes, than to dwell on it.

He had lost that detachment though at some point in Afghanistan. Seeing half a platoon gunned down in front of him, running out to help before the all clear had been declared and receiving a parting shot from the retreating insurgents in his shoulder had made it all too close, too personal. Being wounded, becoming a patient, being certain in that moment that this was where he would breathe his last, out here in this dusty wasteland, was one thing. But what he had really struggled with, what had given him the flashbacks and the PTSD that had eventually invalided him out of the army, was the knowledge that he had let down those men. He had been the medic on that base station. Without him, the wounded men had had to wait until the helicopter retrieval team arrived for medical help. Without him three of them had died, and that was something that he would have to carry with him to the end of his days.

He had to focus now, concentrate on Sherlock, keep him alive until they reached The London. The monitor showed increasing number of ectopic beats, a sure sign of an irritated heart. A cardiac injury then, or perhaps just Sherlock's heart showing the effects of the blood loss. And then another thought crept through him. Icy cold realisation creeping in, as he turned Sherlock's head away from him, grabbed a pen torch from the paramedics pocket without asking, and shone it across Sherlock's neck. His jugular vein, the large vein in his neck, the one that should be flat from blood loss, was distended. That meant only one thing. Back pressure from the heart. He grabbed the stethoscope from where it was lying at the end of the trolley and listened for heart sounds. Quiet, muffled. Bollocks.

'Have you got a long needle?' he asked the paramedic sounding more calm than he felt?

'Only cannulas,' came the reply.

'So what do you do when your patient develops a cardiac tamponade?'

'Put our foot down,' came the grim reply, as the paramedic saw what he was seeing. 'Floor it, Mike, will you? We've got trouble back here.'

'Hold on Sherlock, just hold on,' John whispered, holding his friends hand, because he realised that doctor or not that was all he could do for Sherlock now. Hold his hand, and pray that they got there in time.


	2. Chapter 2

Within seconds of arriving at A&E, the rear doors of the ambulance had been flung open by the technician, and there were suddenly a crowd of people around the trolley as they ran with it in the Resuscitation Room. Trauma Calls at The London were run with an efficiency that reminded John of his army days. Handover from the paramedics was rapid, even as Sherlock was slid over onto the A&E trolley; monitors were reattached, and there were people everywhere; anaesthetists checking his airway, preparing to intubate, listening to his chest, inserting more lines, taking blood; A&E doctors performing a primary survey; nurses cutting off his clothes, his precious coat for heavens sake. John really hoped that he had a spare. Sherlock loved that coat. Surgeons were assessing his abdomen and deeming the injury likely to be thoracic only; the Team Leader was shouting questions and the designated scribe documenting replies, observations and drug doses on the white board in the corner. And through it all, John could only fixate on the monitor showing Sherlock's heart rhythm and pray for it to keep beating.

Feeling suddenly redundant he stumbled to one side, just shaking his head at the nurse's suggestion that he should take a seat in their relatives room. He couldn't leave Sherlock, why couldn't they see that?

Searching the room for a familiar face, for someone who might understand that, he spotted an old medical school colleague standing calmly on the periphery of the bustle. James Macpherson, a quiet spoken Scot, who had been the toast of Bart's rugby team and had drunk John under the table on more than one occasion; but then Mary could drink John under the table, let alone a six foot two rugby player. John had bumped into James at a medical school reunion the previous autumn, only a few weeks before Sherlock's return. He was a cardio-thoracic surgeon here now, John remembered, with an international reputation. If he was the surgeon on call, then Sherlock had a good chance, the best chance that he could have of survival.

'James!' he called across to him, even as the nurse guiding him away from Sherlock, trying to persuade him to leave the room, became more insistent. Relatives, even medical ones, weren't generally encouraged to linger in resuscitation rooms.

'John Watson - what are you doing here?' James asked, coming over to him and nodding to the nurse that she could leave him where he was.

'It's Sherlock,' John said simply, his voice catching slightly as he looked at the still figure on the bed. The anesthetist was tying an endotracheal tube in already - that had been fast, and he noticed that blood was already flowing from the rapid infuser into his friend's arm.

'Were you with him - when he got shot?' James asked, focused on the task at hand, with no time for meaningless platitudes. John was grateful for that.

'Did you see the trajectory of the bullet?' James asked. 'It might be important. Give us an idea of the likely area of damage'

John shook his head. 'I was in another room,' he said, then unable to suppress the medic in him, despite his confidence in the team, 'He's got a cardiac tamponade, James, I'm sure or it. Shouldn't you be...'

'The tamponade is only part of his problem,' James said, indicating the screen of the portable scanner next to he bed, which John hadn't noticed until now. Another shorter man, also dressed in surgical greens, was holding an ultrasound probe on Sherlock's chest wall with one hand, clicking buttons with the other, taking measurements. John could see Sherlock's heart beating on the screen, with a thick black line around the pulsating chambers.

'What is that?' he asked fascinated, despite the situation.

'Bedside ultrasound,' James told him. 'You need to get back to the sharp end John. He has got a tamponade, or rather he's got fluid in his pericardium, but it's not massively compromising his cardiac function. What worries me more is the massive volume of blood he's got in his mediastinum and in both sides of his thorax. It's a miracle he didn't bleed out before he got here.'

'Have we instituted the major haemorrhage protocol?' This last sentence was directed to the leader of the trauma team, who nodded. 'Absolutely. Platelets and FFP about to be hooked up as soon as we get the central line in.' John noticed the anaesthetist had draped a surgical sheet over one side of Sherlock's neck and was expertly inserting the guide wire for a line. His friend was disappearing beneath a swathe of lines and people, and John could only feel grateful for that.

'Tranexamic acid?' To help clotting, of course. They were giving it to all major trauma victims now, John remembered reading something about that last year in a journal. How fast things changed.

'Already in,' came the reply. 'Theatres ready to go?'

James looked across at the Operating Department Practitioner waiting by the phone, who nodded back at him. 'Ready and waiting,' he said. ' Let's get that line in, get the FFP running and then go.'

'Pericardial drain?' John asked, unable to forget that thin black layer of blood around his friends heart. If it got much larger, then the pressure of it would stop his heart from beating altogether, he knew, but James shook his head.

'Not worth the delay,' he said. 'Turn off the tap, John, that's the only way to deal with bleeding, you know that. He needs a thoracostomy - we can have his chest open in theatre within ten minutes, before we'd even have time to set up for a drain.

Sherlock was being connected to the transfer monitor even before the dressing had gone on the central line, the murky coloured bags of fresh frozen plasma, crammed full of the clotting factors that Sherlock so badly needed, were hung from the drip pole, and then they were clicking the brakes off the trolley, a nurse pushing the rapid infuser alongside, and they were running again towards the lift. So many lines, so many people, so much equipment, all focused on keeping one frail human body alive. Sherlock had been wrong. He had told John long ago that the mind was what mattered and that everything else was transport. But his mind needed the rest of him, needed the body that he was frequently so negligent of and careless with. In the presence of danger, it was ironic that his mind had been the first thing to shut down. When the blood had started to pour out of the hole that the bullet had ripped in his chest, his heart had continued to beat, his lungs to breathe, but his mind - his precious mind had disappeared somewhere else entirely. And John knew that there was no guarantee that it would ever be the same again. His body wasn't just transport, it was what kept his brain perfused with blood and fed with glucose and oxygen. Breathing might be boring, but it was also necessary.

John walked along with the trolley, accompanied Sherlock into the lift, watched the monitor with it's frequent ectopic beats, and the blood pressure which still read frightening. 'I want to scrub in,' he said to James, unable to face the prospect of leaving his friend.

James shook his head. 'Not a good idea,' he said. 'No offense, John, but you're not a surgeon anymore.'

'Can I observe then, at least.'

James hesitated for a second, and then asked. 'Do you know who did this?'

'I've got a fair idea, yes.'

'And do the police know? Have you told them? The ambulance crew called them, you know. They always do - protocol. They're down in A&E waiting to talk to you.'

'I - no,' John said. 'There wasn't time.'

'Then I suggest that you go and talk to them. Find the bad guy, isn't that what you and Sherlock do?'

'I-' John started as the lift doors opened and the trolley was being pushed through the already open doors into the operating theatre complex directly opposite.

'Go and do your job, John,' James said kindly with a hand on his shoulder, 'And let us do ours. Go and catch the bad guy. We'll take good care of him.'

John could do little more than look at the ground, and nod, knowing that James was right. And as the doors flapped shut behind the surgeon, his last view of Sherlock was of him lying ashen white on the trolley as he was wheeled into the inner sanctum of the operating theatre.


	3. Chapter 3

John stood and stared at the closed door for a moment, debating ringing on the doorbell and begging to be let in. But James was right. He was effectively a civilian here. His presence in theatre would only hinder the delicate surgery that was to follow. He could imagine what would be happening behind those doors; sliding Sherlock onto the operating table, careful not to catch the many lines and wires attached to him, connecting the endotracheal tube to the anaesthetic machine, starting the sevoflurane to ensure an adequate anaesthetic. The anaesthetist would be carefully documenting physiological measurements, twiddling with the knobs on the anaesthetic machine, giving small boluses of meteraminol to attempt to maintain his blood pressure, hanging bags of blood, of platelets, of fresh frozen plasma.

The theatre nurses would be opening surgical packs, slopping betadine over Sherlock's chest, clipping on the surgical drapes while the surgeons scrubbed. Would his heart continue to beat until they were ready to begin, or would there be a hurried scramble to open his chest as the beeping of the heart beat on the monitor got slower and eventually stopped altogether; as his blood pressure dropped precipitously and no amount of fluid or inotropes could bring it back up?

John swallowed and sat down quickly on a handy chair fixed to the wall next to the theatres. Placed there, no doubt for just such eventualities. He couldn't think too hard of what they were doing to Sherlock behind those doors. He had to trust James and his team to do what they could to save his friend. What was the survival rate from a trans-mediastinal gun shot wound? Twenty percent? Twenty five? Higher for the right side than the left perhaps, higher still if you reached hospital and higher yet if you reached theatre. If Sherlock could survive until they could get him on bypass then he had a fighting chance. Christ. John slumped forward, head in hands, trying not to think about it; trying to slow his breathing a little. He hadn't felt like this since the PTSD that he had experienced before he had met Sherlock.

He had been sitting there for several minutes, trying to spur his brain and his body back into action when he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. 'John? Are you okay?'

He looked up. It was the nurse - the one from A&E, the one who had tried to get him to leave the Resus Room. There was a porter standing next to her, and a load of monitors and other kit on the trolley. Of course - she would have stayed to help them transfer Sherlock onto the operating table, and then retrieved the trolley and equipmentto take back to A&E, ready for the next patient.

'Yeah, I'm - I'm fine,' John said slowly, realising that he wasn't. He really, really wasn't. Watching Sherlock die once had been - crucifying. Watching it all happen again was - there were no words for this. None at all.

'You go on Sean, I'll catch up,' the nurse said to the porter, as she squatted next to John, hand still on his arm.

'He'll be okay, you know. He's in the best hands,' she said.

'You don't know that,' John said.

'He's got a fighting chance.'

'He's got a good chance of dying too.'

'For what it's worth, if it was my partner in there, then I'd want James Mcpherson operating on him.'

John nodded. Eyes fixed back on the floor. 'I know. James is a good man. He'll do his best.'

They sat in silence for a while. 'Have you been together long?' the nurse asked finally.

'No,' John said looking up at her and shaking his head. 'We're not - I'm not his partner. I'm married.' And then with increasing exasperation 'To a woman. I'm married to a woman. Sherlock is just a friend - a good friend. The best.' He tailed off.

The nurse looked mortified, stuttering, cheeks flaming, 'Oh God, I'm sorry, I just saw the wedding ring, and how upset you were, and I assumed...'

'You're not the first, and you won't be the last,' John said with a sigh. 'Please don't feel bad about it. He's just - he's important to me. I thought I'd lost him before, and I hadn't, and - Oh Christ, you're not going to sell this to the papers are you?'

The nurse smiled. 'Of course not. Patient confidentiality and all that. Not that I would anyway. Look - do you want to call anyone? To be with you? Your wife perhaps?'

John shook his head, 'No, she's pregnant. I don't want to worry her - not until we know.'

'Were you out of your fucking mind?' they both jumped at Lestrade's voice as he strode towards them down the hospital corridor.

'Greg!' John said, unsure why he was so surprised at the DIs appearance. Both the paramedics and the security in CAM news would have informed the police about the shooting, of course, and someone would have contacted Lestrade as soon as they realised the identity of the victim.

'You do what - you break into Magnussen's office, you knock out the security guard, you threaten him with a gun. What the fuck did you think you were up to?'

'We - no!' John said, ignoring the nurse's shocked expression, and how quickly she dropped her hand from his arm. 'That wasn't it at all. Is that what he's saying? We didn't have a gun for fucks sake. And we didn't break in. Janine - his PA, let us in. Ask her!'

'We will when she's medically fit for interview,' Greg said, calming down a little. 'She's in CT scan at the moment. They brought her in the ambulance behind yours. Suspected concussion. Security guard is still babbling too. He's not going to be up to anything much for a while. Promise that wasn't your doing?'

'What - you think I go around clocking people over the head with blunt objects? I'm a doctor Greg, for heavens sake. I've got far more sophisticated ways of rendering people unconscious if I need to.'

Greg smirked, and John couldn't help but crack a smile too, despite everything.

'So I don't have to arrest you?' Greg asked.

'No,' John told him. 'Technically speaking, we did nothing illegal.'

'Is he okay?' Greg asked, nodding towards the operating theatre doors. 'They said he was in surgery. They didn't say how bad it was.'

'It's bad, Greg,' John said soberly. 'It's about as bad as it can get. I thought he was going to die on me in the ambulance. Again.'

'Stupid bastard,' Greg said. 'What did he want to go and get himself shot for?'

'No idea,' John said wearily. 'I was in another room. What is Magnussen saying?'

'Very little,' Greg said. 'He's in a private medical facility across the city. Sounds as if he got pistol-whipped, and now he's claiming concussion and memory loss.'

'How convenient,' John said dryly, then realising the nurse was still there. 'Look, I'll be fine now. This idiot, believe it or not, is a friend of mine. We'll find our way back to the officers in A&E in a bit. and - thanks,' he said as the nurse turned to go. 'For everything. You've been very kind.'

'Pretty,' Lestrade mused as the lift doors closed behind her.

'I hadn't noticed,' John said sarcastically. 'I'm a married man now Greg, remember? Anyway, can we get back to Magnussen? If he can't remember anything then how come he's accusing us of threatening him with a gun?'

'He says he remembers someone breaking in and threatening him. He conveniently can't remember anything at all about that individual, but he's suggested that we draw our own conclusions from the presence of you and Sherlock in his office.'

'What, so he thinks Sherlock shot himself?'

'He suggests bungled burglary. which reminds me - arms up!'

'What?'

'I need to frisk you for a weapon, John. You know how it is.'

'Oh for fucks sake,' John started to say, but stood up and held his arms out anyway, letting Greg pat him down for concealed weapons. Twice in one day, what was the odds of that? He found himself wondering if this was why Sherlock had told him not to bring his gun. That could have taken some explaining, plus a night or two in a police cell while the ballistics came back on the bullet that James Mcpherson was hopefully even now removing from Sherlock's chest.

'He could die, you know Greg,' John said soberly. 'Just because he's got to theatre doesn't mean that he's going to survive. They shot him in the chest; they damaged his heart.'

'Sherlock Holmes die of a broken heart?' Greg said reassuringly. 'I don't think so John, do you? He'll pull through, the bastard always does. He just enjoys making us sweat. Now can I get you to come downstairs and do the formal interview bit? Dimmock and Donovan are waiting in one of the interview rooms in A&E. We need to catch this bastard, before he does the same thing to someone else.'


	4. Chapter 4

Anderson and Donovan were clicking through images on a laptop, pointing and discussing things in low voices when Greg and John and reached the interview room. They looked up as they walked in, and John was gratified to see the concern in their faces.

'Is he - okay?' Anderson asked.

'He's still alive,' John said. 'That's the best we can hope for, for now.'

'Lets concentrate on finding the bastard who did this,' Greg said. 'Any updates?'

'Dimmock has gone across to the medical centre to try to get some more information out of Magnussen,' Sally Donovan said. 'Tyler is working the crime scene with the forensics team - trying to get some DNA from the shooter if we can. Which reminds me, John - we need a DNA sample from you as well, so we can rule your DNA out.'

'Fine,' John said numbly, opening his mouth as Andersen approached him with a swab.

'Right,' Greg said. 'Now that's done, John we need you to have look at these photos we've had sent across and tell us where exactly Sherlock was in the room when you found him, so we know where to concentrate the search.'

The lights were bright in the interview room, and John felt oddly light-headed and disconnected. He ought to phone Mary, to tell her what had happened. He ought to phone Mycroft - shouldn't he? Sherlocks parents even. Christ, he didn't even have their phone number. How would they react? Would they think this was just another magic trick?

'John!' came Greg's voice, making him start.

'Sorry,' he said. 'I was just thinking -'

'John this is important,' Greg said urgently. 'We need to find the shooter before they come back for a second crack.'

'What - you think it was planned?' John said incredulously. 'You can't be serious. Nobody knew that we were going to Magnussen's office. You can't think this was a hit on Sherlock.'

'We're not ruling anything else at this point in time,' Greg said. 'I'm having armed officers placed on the doors to the operating theatre. It might not be chance, John. People don't generally get shot just by surprising intruders. Whoever beat you to Magnussen's office, it was a professional job. They hacked the security system to get in from the helipad doors. That security system was virtually impenetrable. Whoever beat you there, knew what they were doing. They weren't there by chance, and shooting Sherlock could have been a calculated move.'

John pulled out one of the chairs placed round the table and slumped down into it; his legs no longer feeling up to the effort of standing.

'Now, can you show us where Sherlock was when you found him?' Greg was asking

'Here - in front of the mirror,' John said, indicating with his finger on the laptop screen. Anderson used the mouse to click on the position that he indicated. At the touch of a button, the outline of a man appeared, centred on the cross. John took a deep breath. It made it look a little too much like a murder scene for his liking.

'Like this?' he asked.

'Other way round,' John said, 'and further from the door.'

Anderson made some more adjustments, until the outline was in the position that John remembered Sherlock lying.

'And Magnussen? Where was he?' Greg asked.

'Over there,' John said, indicating. Another click and another outline appeared.

'So the shooter must have been between them, yes?'

'No idea,' John said, rubbing the back of the neck, wondering why it had to be so bloody hot in there. 'Sherlock heard something from upstairs. 'A chair scraping perhaps, to let him know that Magnussen was upstairs. He must have disturbed the intruder.'

'Did he know there was someone else there?'

'Of course. We'd found Janine and the security guard out cold.'

'Did Sherlock have any idea who the intruder could be?'

John opened his mouth to explains about the perfume trail, but something stopped him, it was ridiculous, of course it was ridiculous, so instead he shook his head. 'Not really, he said,' unsure why he was so unwilling to give this piece of information away.

Greg nodded. 'So how about you take us back to the beginning John. And tell us everything. No holding back. We can always - sanitise the report a little later to keep his nibs out of trouble.'

And so John recounted the events of the evening. Meeting Sherlock on the ground floor of CM News at 7.30, as instructed. Sherlock taking them through the security barriers and up to the third floor canteen, where they had got coffee, and waited for twenty minutes or so for the building to start emptying. He tried to gloss over how they had got into Magnussen's office, but Greg wasn't having any of it.

'There are layers and layers of security preventing anyone from getting into that office, he said. 'And what, Magnussen's PA just let him in?'

'He knows her,' John said succinctly.

Greg was clicking through images on his laptop as he talked, bringing up a picture of Janine's security pass. 'How did he-,' he started, then, 'Hang on. Wasn't she Mary's bridesmaid at the wedding? Irish girl? Pretty but mildly terrifying? But why would he let her into Magnussen's office?'

'Um...' John hesitated..

'John...' Greg said with a warning edge to his voice.

'Sherlock and Janine have sort of been - seeing each other,' John said.

Donovan choked on a mouthful of coffee, spitting it across the papers on the table. 'Seeing each other, as in...'

'My reaction exactly,' John said.

'Sherlock has got a girlfriend,' Sally repeated in disbelief.

'So what, her boyfriend - and that's definitely something I'll have to process later, by the way - her boyfriend pitches up to see her at work and she just lets him into one of the most secure offices in London? How long have they been seeing each other anyway?'

'A month,' John said with a wince.

'So how did Sherlock know that she'd let him in?'

'He - um - sort of proposed, ' John said, waiting for the explosion.

But there wasn't one. There was just a stunned silence.

'Right,' Greg said, slowly. 'So he meets Magnussen's PA at a wedding in a fortunate twist of fate, presumably wines and dines her to get her to go out with him, and then gets engaged to the girl all in order to get into his office? And was that all it was, do we think? I mean they weren't really...'

'Why are you asking me?' John said. 'All I know is that she was coming out of Sherlock's bedroom this morning - where incidentally Sherlock hadn't been all night, I found him - never mind. But she's moved the coffee in his flat and they were sharing bathroom time this morning, so draw your own conclusions from that.'

'Crikey,' Andersen said, sounding shell-shocked. 'So maybe him and Molly...'

'No!' three voices exploded at once.

'Can we leave your crack-pot theories about his leap of death just for once and focus on the case in hand?' Greg said with a sigh.

'Fine by me,' John said wearily. Christ he was tired. His day had started all to quickly with his decision to be a good Samaritan and rescue Issac. And since then he'd what - discovered his best friend was a junkie, or at least doing a very good imitation of one, that he had a girlfriend, had an audience with arguably the most dangerous man in the Western world, listened to the same man piss into the 221b fireplace, broken into an office with fourteen layers of security, watched Sherlock get engaged and then less than ten minutes later found him bleeding and nearly dying on Magnussen's office floor. It had been an extremely long day, and his bed seemed a very appealing place right now.

'So,' Greg was saying, 'Janine let you into the lift, you went up into the office, and then...'

'She wasn't waiting at the top as we expected,' John said. We went into the office and found her out cold on the floor, she'd been hit across the back of the head by the look of it, the security guard was in a similar state in the room next door,' John said. 'I checked that they were both breathing. Sherlock realised that someone else had beaten us to it. Then he heard a noise from upstairs and went to investigate. He told me to stay with Janine. I stupidly complied.'

'If you hadn't, you might both had been shot,' Greg said reasonably.

'Possibly.'

'And then?'

'Um - then Janine woke up, closely followed by the security guard. The security guard pulled his panic alarm, but I got Janine to turn it off before it could scare off the intruder. Once I knew she was okay, I went to find Sherlock.

'And you found him lying on the floor in Magnussen's office, as you've described'

'Yes.'

'Any sign of anyone else?'

'I don't know,' John said, shaking his head, and taking off his coat, pulling open the neck of his shirt. 'I don't think so.' The room suddenly seemed hotter than ever, the walls closer. He felt trapped, and a little nauseated. 'I need some air,' he said abruptly, turning and walking out of the interview room, through the Emergency Department, aiming for the ambulance entrance, knowing that was always the quickest way out, ignoring the curious glances of the crews waiting to offload as he hit the button on the wall by the doors to get out.

Cool air hit his face and he started to feel better almost immediately. Another panic attack. The second one in less than an hour. He needed to get a handle on this. He needed - Mary, he needed Mary. He sunk down on a bench a little way from the Emergency Department and turned his phone over in his hands, debating calling her, asking her to come here to be with him, but he couldn't bear the thought of having to explain it all again, not even to her. He checked the time on his phone. A quarter past nine.. How could it possibly be so early? A little over two hours since he had wandered out of the tube and walked to meet Sherlock at what he knew now to be the building that housed Magnussen's office. He had been whistling a little as he went, fired up by the challenge of a case after the weeks of boredom. If he had refused to go, would Sherlock still have gone alone? If he had stayed at home with Mary then would events have turned out differently? Would Sherlock have been more cautious or less so? Would he still have been shot? Would he have been found? What if - what if. No point in wondering that now.

All that mattered was that Sherlock was lying on the operating table upstairs, fighting for his life, and he needed to go back into that room and help Lestrade and his team work out who had shot Sherlock and why. And he couldn't do it. Not alone. Sherlock was the one who solved crimes, not him. Alone he was - useless, and lost, and he had absolutely no idea how to do this.

'Brought you this,' said a gruff voice next to him, and a can of Coke was pushed into his hand, as Greg Lestrade came and sat next to him.

'Thanks,' John said, resting the cold can against his forehead for a moment, hoping it would help to focus him.

'I would have brought you coffee, but the machine's out of order. Bloody vandals,' Greg said.

'No, this is good, This is better,' John said, opening the can with a hiss and taking a swig. Cold, sweet. It helped.

'Look John, I know this is - well this is shit, isn't it?' Greg said. 'Here am I trying to get a statement out of you and-'

'You're just trying to do your job, Greg,' John cut in. 'I know that. I'm just - I'm not handling it very well.'

'Can't have been easy. Finding him like that.'

'No,'

'But you got him here alive, John. You did good.'

John shook his head slightly. 'I did very little in the end. There was very little that I could do. And you know the worse thing? I thought that I was going to have to crack his chest in the ambulance, and I didn't know if I could do it.'

'If you had to, then you would have.'

'Would I? I'm not so sure.' John held out his hands. They were shaking.

'Fuck. Look what the bastard has done to me.'

'Done to all of us, John. Again. If he pulls through this then we can toss a coin over who gets to punch him first.'

They sat there in companiable silence for a while. Then John took another swig of his Coke, and said, 'I don't know why he's let this case do this to him, Greg. I don't know why he's gone to the extents that he has to try to get to Magnussen.'

'Is that what this is all about?'

John nodded. 'I think so.'

'And did he really get engaged?'

'Only for about two minutes, but - oh fuck, who's going to tell Janine?'

'Sally's going to interview her in a minute,' Greg said. 'I suspect she might slip it into the conversation.'

John groaned. 'Tell her not to. I'll do it.'

'Sure?'

'Yes.'

'Have you told Mary yet?'

'No- I. I'd rather not tell her until we know - which way its going to go. She'd only worry, and I want to spare her that if I can. She's fond of Sherlock, you know? She likes him, she thinks of him as a friend - a good friend. She'll be devastated. I'd rather be able to tell her that he's going to be okay.'

'And Mycroft?'

John looked at Greg in surprise. 'You mean you haven't told him?'

'Give me a chance, John. We only got the shout just over an hour ago. In that time, I've deployed a scenes of crime team, sealed off the area, and carried out preliminary interviews with the two main witnesses. I think that's pretty bloody fast work. Besides, I assumed that you would have told him.'

'Not yet.'

'You want me to send an officer round?'

'No - I'll, I'll do it. I'll phone him. Sherlock's parents will need to be told too, won't they?'

'His parents?'

'Yeah. I met them not long after his return from the dead. I didn't even know that they existed, did you?'

'No - I always assumed that he and Mycroft were manufactured in a laboratory somewhere, or something. I can't imagine them all sitting round eating Sunday lunch, somehow. They're always so - other, so removed. What are they like, his parents I mean?'

'Normal,' John murmured. 'Very, very normal. Well, no time like the present, I suppose.' He flicked through his contacts until he found Mycroft Holmes' number, then pressed the button to dial, but instead of Mycroft's voice, he got Anthea's.

'Anthea, it's John Watson. Is Mycroft there?'

'No, he's in a meeting. Can I take a message?'

'No, I need to talk to him. It's urgent.'

'He can't be disturbed at the moment, John. Can I get him to call you when he's free?'

'Is he likely to be long?'

'Difficult to say. Several hours I would say. Possibly all night.'

'Can you get a message to him?'

'It's not that kind of meeting, John.'

'Anthea, Sherlock's been shot,' John said, horrified to realise that his voice was cracking. 'Mycroft needs to know.'

'How bad?' Anthea's clipped tones demanded.

'Well he's still alive,' John said. 'But it's touch and go. He's in surgery at the Royal London. Just - tell Mycroft that will you? When you can. Tell him that unless he's preventing World War III, he needs to come and be with his brother; because it might well be his last chance.'


	5. Chapter 5

The conversation with Janine was easier than he had expected. Easier - and more perplexing.

'Did that bastard friend of yours get engaged to me just to break into my boss's office?' she asked, as soon as John walked into the cubicle.

'Techincally, I don't think that you actually got engaged,' John said, 'At least, I can't recall you saying yes.'

'Ah, but the papers won't know that, will they?'

'The papers? Janine, what are you going to do?'

'Oh, extract a little revenge I think. I haven't quite decided yet,' she said, still pressing an ice pack to the back of her head. 'Sweet Mother Mary, I've got no idea what I got hit with, but it felt like a crowbar.'

'Pistol butt, we think.'

'Oh, pistol butt. Classy. I suppose I should count myself lucky that he only hit me with it, then. Did they catch the guy?'

'Not yet, no. I take it you didn't get a good look at him?'

'I didn't even see him. I was walking towards the door to meet Sherlock. Next thing I remember I was waking up on the floor, and you were there. Wasn't you was it?'

'No, of course not!' John said indignantly.

'Ah - I'm only teasing, John. Trying to prove that my sense of humour has survived intact. Where is Sherlock, by the way? Too chicken to come and apologise himself? He does realise that he's almost certainly lost me my job?'

'He -' he looked up at Donovan, who had accompanied him back into the cubicle to see Janine, but she just shrugged. Damn, he had assumed that she would have told Janine what had happened.

'He got shot, Janine. By whoever attacked you, we assume.'

Janine went white and her free hand flew to her mouth. 'But he's okay, isn't he? I mean, he's going to be okay.'

'We - don't know,' John said quietly, wondering how many more times that evening he was going to have to have the same conversation. 'He's in surgery at the moment. It could go either way.'

'Well that's one hell of a way to stop someone being pissed off with you,' Janine muttered.

'Janine - about you and Sherlock -'

'Oh save it, John, I knew it wasn't real, I knew it wouldn't last. I was just curious to see how far he'd take it. I should have known that he had an ulterior motive. After all,' she gave John a wry smile, 'I'm not exactly his type am I?'

'Oddly enough, I don't have a clue what his type is,' John said.

'Don't your now,' Janine said, and she gave John a look which was half puzzled and half disbelieving. 'Ah, he's a funny one, your Sherlock Holmes, but he's certainly an experience that I'll never forget.'

'What do you mean?' John asked.

'Well that's for me to know and you to read in the papers isn't it?' she said, moving the ice pack off her head and wincing. 'Ouch. Well if you don't have any other questions for me, Sergeant Donavan, then I'm for my bed. Alone,' this last word pointedly directed at John. 'But then there's no real change there, is there?'

'Janine,' John said as she jumped down off the trolley and picked her bag up from the chair. 'What you said about the papers. You wouldn't really, would you?'

'Give my love to Mary,' she said as she walked out of the cubicle with a smirk.

'Don't say a word,' John said to Sally Donovan, as she opened her mouth to comment.

'Wouldn't dream of it,' she said - 'But-'

'Leave it, Sally,' Greg Lestrade said, pulling back the curtains on the cubicle. 'You wouldn't like John when he's angry - believe me, it's not a pretty sight.'

John opted to go with Greg to try and interview the security guard, but he could add little more than Janine. He too, had been taken by surprise, hit over the head by a heavy object from behind as he patrolled the office area. He had heard nothing, seen nothing. The intruder had entered like a ghost, leaving no sign of their presence.

'Fingerprints?' he asked Greg as they walked back into the interview room, which was temporarily empty. Anderson had gone back to the lab to help analyse the samples from the crime scene, and Sally was off on a search for more caffeine.

'Nothing,' he said. 'At least none that we can't track to people who should have been there - and you and Sherlock, of course.'

'DNA?'

'Not looking good. But there's something else, John, come and look at this.' He spun the computer round, so that John could see the computerised model of the crime scene.

'Look at where you found Sherlock,' he said. 'He didn't get shot at the door when he surprised the intruder, he walked all the way into the room. The intruder let him know that he was all the way inside the room. Now assuming that the intruder got there first, and was already threatening Magnussen, why would he have done that? If the intruder intended to shoot him, why not do it straight away? Why wait?'

'Well, you know Sherlock,' John said, with a forced smile. 'Always got the gift of the gab. He'd try to negotiate with the devil given half a chance.'

'But why would the shooter have let him? Why not just shoot him directly? And then why not shoot Magnussen too? It doesn't add up John.' Greg ran a hand through his cropped hair. 'Something more must have happened in that room. We just have to hope that Sherlock wakes up and is able to tell us.'


	6. Chapter 6

Sherlock had survived surgery.

That was all that John knew, all that he cared about, all that he could hear.

'John?' James Macpherson was saying.

'Sorry, sorry,' John said, focusing his gaze at the picture of the lake scene on the far wall of the ITU relatives room, which he had been staring at for half the night, trying to ground himself. 'I'm just - thank you James. you did a good job.'

'He's not out of he woods yet,' James warned him. The next twenty four hours will be crucial. If the bleeding restarts, or if he goes into failure, then he's in trouble. But he's relatively young and fit, so he should have enough reserve to get through.'

John thought about finding Sherlock coming down from his high in the crack den that morning. He hadn't looked particularly fit then. Should he tell James? Sherlock had said that it was for a case, after all, but the toxicology screen that Molly had done had been positive. He had used drugs, and not in the cleanest of environments either. He had potentially put himself at risk of all kinds of infection - not to mention the risks of sharing needles. But he wouldn't have done that would he? He wouldn't have been that stupid. Not even for a case.

'Is there something that I need to know?' James asked, reading the conflict on John's face. For a man who had been operating for most of the night, he was still remarkably alert and switched on.

'In confidentiality?' John asked.

'Of course.'

'And not to go in his notes?'

'Just tell me, John. The smallest thing could make a difference at this point.'

'He's been using drugs.' John's words came out in a tumble. 'He said it was for a case, but I'm not so sure. He had a problem before - years ago. I have no idea how deep it's got this time.'

'Do you know what?'

'Heroin, I think, from how he was this morning. I'm not sure what else. I think he used cocaine before too though, among other things.'

'Has he been using it intravenously?'

'I think so.'

'Then we need to do a toxicology screen, and check him for blood borne viruses - HIV, hepatitis. It's important that we know John, you know that.'

'On the record?' John asked.

'The blood-borne virus screen is routine for the majority of ITU patients anyway - in case we need to haemofilter them, so it's easy to get that done. If the drug screen comes back as positive, then it should be in his notes, so that everyone who is treating him is aware. If he has been abusing opiates then it will have an impact on the amount of analgesia that he needs here to keep him comfortable. Besides, we don't know that Sherlock would object to being tested. We have to act in his best interests at the moment, until he can express an opinion.'

'I've got power of attorney,' John said suddenly.

'What?'

'I've got Long Acting Power of Attorney for him. He did it years ago - so I could stop Mycroft from interfering if he got incapacitated. I'd forgotten.'

'Do you have the form?'

'There's a copy at home somewhere, and one filed with his solicitor. I can call them.'

'Get them to fax it over will you? That means that you can make decisions for him. Does it specify medical decisions and life-saving treatment too?'

'Of course. Sherlock was nothing if not prepared, no matter how chaotic his life might have appeared to outsiders.'

'So can we test him.'

'Absolutely,' John said, realising that this was exactly what Sherlock, who had after all wanted Magnussen to believe that he was a drug addict, would want. It was all about the case, always about the case, and if he ever recovered enough to get back to it, then he would extract some degree of amusement in knowing that the work had continued even while he was unconscious. He considered telling James that Sherlock had already been tested, less than twenty four hours ago and had tested positive - although for what substance, Molly hadn't said. But James would find out soon enough.

'James - I'm sorry I didn't tell you. Before.'

'Before I had my hands up to my wrists in his thoracic cavity?' John winced at the imagery that evoked.

'Don't worry, John. There wasn't exactly a lot of time to play with before we took him upstairs. It's a risk that we always take. Gun shot wound victims round here don't tend to come from the higher stratus of society, if you know what I mean.'

'Gang violence?' John asked interested.

'Sometimes. Or disputes about drugs, both are common. We always try not to judge, of course, but it's refreshing to operate on someone in these circumstances when you know that their survival will be a force for good. Most of the time you're not so sure.'

John reached over and shook James' hand. 'Thank you, James,' he said, with feeling.

'I know how much he means to you, John,' James said. 'I would have done the same for any patient, but rarely have I operated on anyone when I felt that the stakes were so high.'

'Was it close?' John asked.

'He gave us a few hairy moments. There was a lot of blood in both the right side of the chest and the mediastinum. Opening up the pericardium always carries a risk in a patient with a known tamponade. Fortunately we had bypass standing by for when his pressure dropped.'

'Did he arrest?' John asked, back in doctor mode now. Wanting to know, needing to know the details of the surgery that he hadn't been allowed to witness.

'Technically, yes, but it was less than two minutes before we had him on bypass. He shouldn't suffer any lasting neurological damage. Whether he has any long term sequelae from the prolonged period of hypotension is another question. His brain must have been deprived of oxygen for a significant amount of time.'

'He wouldn't handle that well,' John sad.

'One step at a time. Let's get him through the next twenty four hours and off ITU first, then we can deal with the rest.'

'So where was the bleeding coming from in the end?'

'The bullet had gone slightly tangentially in at the fifth intercostal space, as you saw. It hit the right middle lobe of the lung, went into the pericardium, just grazed the right ventricle without entering the chamber, but then penetrated the IVC; that was where most of the bleeding was coming from. It ended up lodged in the transverse process of his vertebra posteriorly, Another couple of centimetres laterally and it would have hit his spinal cord, and then he would have been in trouble.'

'Have the police got the bullet for ballistics?' John asked.

'Yes, and I've given them the brief version of his injuries. I said I'd go back and talk to them in more detail once I'd let you know what the situation was.'

'Greg Lestrade's a good friend of mine - and Sherlock's,' John said. 'He's leading the investigation. If anyone can find the shooter, he can.'

'I'll give him as much information as I can,' James said. 'And now here's something interesting for you. I think the shooter was left handed.'

John smirked slightly, despite everything. 'Sherlock rubbing off on you?'

'I've seen a few gun shot wounds. Been to court for a fair few, too. You pick up pointers from the forensic reports. Few gunshot wounds have an entirely straight trajectory, and people tend to veer towards the entry wound was on the right side of his chest, then angled maybe five degrees medially. For a right handed shooter to do that, they would have had to be standing to Sherlock's right and then the angle would have been greater. It's just a hunch.'

John failed to conceal his surprise. 'Well make sure you tell Lestrade about your hunch,' he said. 'It sounds like a good one. And if you're right, it will rule out ninety percent of the population, so that's a good start.'

'I will do.'

'So when can I see Sherlock?'

'They're just moving him onto the unit now. Give them ten minutes or so to get him transferred across and do handover, and you can go and sit with him. I presume that I don't need to warn you...'

'That he'll look like crap? No, that's fine. The fact that he's alive will do me. Tubes everywhere, I presume?'

'He's got a chest drain and a pericardial drain as well as all the usual lines. We'll try and get the pericardial drain out in a day or two - it's mainly there to help us watch for rebleeding. We'll keep him sedated and tubed for twenty four hours at least; optimise his ventilation and cardiac function, correct the acidosis, make sure there's no further bleeding, then if all goes well they'll do a sedation hold tomorrow and see how he does.'

'Thank you, James,' John said, shaking his hand again. 'So, do you get to go home and sleep now?'

James grinned at him. 'What do you think? No, I've got a ward round in -' he looked at his watch, 'Two and a half hours, and then clinic all morning. I'll go and try to get my head down in my office for a couple of hours or so, I think, and then grab a shower in the theatres changing room before starting my day. Still, it was a nice bit of surgery. Makes the sleep-deprivation worth while.'

'You're making me glad I opted for General Practice,' John said.

'More sleep, less glory,' James said. 'I'll come back and see Sherlock after my clinic. In the meantime, they know where I am, if they need me.'

John spent the next ten minutes staring at that picture of the lake again, and turning his phone over and over in his hands. He wondered what Mycroft Holmes could be up to that would justify him leaving John to keep his vigil alone, and wondered if he should phone Mary. Half past five. She'd be getting up in an hour and a half to go to work. Better to leave it until then. If all was going well, he might just leave Sherlock to the care of the ITU staff and go home and try to get some sleep. Alive. He was alive. That was what mattered.

A quiet knock on the door made him jump, and heralded the arrival in the room of two men in scrubs. One introduced himself as the ITU consultant, the other as the ITU charge nurse. The arrival of medical staff in twos always rang alarm bells with John. It generally meant bad news, but not it seemed on that occasion. Sherlock was critically ill, but he was alive. The next twenty four hours would be crucial, he knew this. The situation could deteriorate. Sherlock was currently being kept alive by a cocktail of inotropes, anaesthetic agents, blood, clotting factors, and various pieces of extremely complex machinery, but none of that mattered. He was alive. And if he could survive jumping over a hundred feet off a roof to certain death, then he could survive this.

Not even seeing Sherlock lying, pale and unresponsive, surrounded by a myriad of beeping and clicking machines, with fluids being poured into him and drained out of him, could take away the overwhelming feeling of relief. John sat with Sherlock for a while, held his hand and talked to him in a way that he never would have been able to had he been awake. It reminded him oddly of his conversations that he had had with Sherlock at his presumed grave, and he remembered him saying, 'I heard you.' He hoped that Sherlock could hear him now, as he told him that they needed him to wake up and get well. That Lestrade needed his help to solve the case. That they needed him to tell them who had shot him, and that Magnussen was still out there, and needed to be stopped. That the game was still on, and waiting for him.

Whether Sherlock heard him or not, he had no idea, but the fact that he could be here, talking to him, was enough. And leaving a case unsolved just wasn't his style. John was banking on that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is deliberately medically accurate, rather than entirely accurate to the screen version. Because unfortunately there's no way that Sherlock could have survived a gunshot wound in that place, with a cardiac arrest, without having bilateral thoracostomies, and that very neat little scar that we saw on screen just wouldn't do it!
> 
> I'm not an intensivist or a cardiothoracic surgeon, so if anyone does spot any inaccuracies please do PM me and let me know. I'm hoping I've made it as realistic as I can. As ever, thank you all for reading x


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter comes BEFORE the one we've seen on screen with Mary running up the stairs at the hospital - in case anyone is confused.
> 
> All will become clear eventually, I promise.

John texted Mary from the cab on the way home an hour later.

'On my way back. Hopefully catch you before you leave for work.'

'Everything okay?'

'I'll explain when I see you.'

He couldn't face telling her over the phone. Better to wait another twenty five minutes until he could get home. He fired off a quick text to a Lestrade too, telling him that Sherlock had survived surgery, that it looked as if he would pull through.

Then he pulled up Mycroft's number and sat there considering. He hadn't heard from him. Not a word. He couldn't still be in that meeting, surely? Had he contacted the hospital directly or did he simply not care? Logically, John knew that wasn't the case, but still, he found Mycroft's degree of disconnection frustrating. After Sherlock's jump from Bart's roof he had been the same. Cold, removed. It wasn't the disinterest that John had found so hard to bear, it was his entire disconnection with John himself. As if Sherlock's apparent removal from Mycroft's life necessitated an end to his connection with John also. After two years of being expected to drop everything at Mycroft's phone call to keep Sherlock safe, he was suddenly simply ignored, like a Victorian governess once their ward was safely married.

Despite his grief, John couldn't help but be offended by this. It wasn't as if he and a Mycroft were ever exactly going to be best friends, but there had been an acquaintance there, a connection in their concern for Sherlock. John had risked his life in the pursuit of cases for Mycroft, and suddenly it was simply switched off, like a light in an empty room.

He considered texting Mycroft to tell him that Sherlock was out of surgery; phoning Anthea even, but then why should he? Let Mycroft stew a little longer, if he cared at all.

The ringing of his phone made him jump. Damn the man, how did he always do that?

'Is he alive?' asked the familiar voice without preamble.

'Morning Mycroft. Lovely to talk to you too,' John said briskly.

'Is he alive, John?'

'Yes, he's alive. He survived surgery. He's on Intensive Care at The London.'

Mycroft Holmes let out a sigh of relief. 'Thank God,' John thought he heard him mutter.

'What happened?'

'He got shot. Mycroft, where have you been ? I phoned you hours ago.'

'I was in a meeting.'

'You were in a meeting for - ' John looked at his watch. 'Ten hours?

'Longer.'

John had no reply for this. 'What happened, John?' Mycroft asked.

'He got shot,' John said bluntly.

'I am aware of that. I am asking how and why he got shot.'

John struggled to control his temper, wondering why Mycroft Holmes always had this effect on him. 'You mean you haven't seen the police report yet? You're slipping, Mycroft.'

'I have just come out of a meeting which lasted for far longer than should have been possible. On my reemergence into the world of humanity, Anthea immediately informed me of the events of last night. She has done a little research to flesh out the details, certainly, but I have looked at none of this. Instead, my first reaction was to telephone you to discover if my brother was alive and to ensure that the culprit had been detained. So if you wouldn't mind, John, tell me what happened.'

John sighed, and sat back in his seat, rubbing his aching neck, and wondering how much he should tell Mycroft. But it would all be in the police report anyway, wouldn't it? And Mycroft might be able to help find the shooter who had disappeared like a ghost.

'We went to Magnussen's office,' John said.

'Why?'

'Sherlock was looking for something that he thought might be there,' John replied.

'Lady Elizabeth Smallwood's letters? For an intelligent man, my brother really can be remarkably stupid. They were bait, of course. Bait for a fool, and he fell straight into the trap.'

'You think it was a trap?' John said. 'And how the hell did you know about the letters?'

'I watch John, I observe. I knew that Lady Smallwood had been to 221b Baker Street. I was aware that Magnussen had made contact with her, and I was aware of the likely nature of her so called pressure point.'

John let out a string of soft swear words. 'Mycroft, if you knew what was going on, then why the hell didn't you do something to stop this?'

'I warned him John, if you remember. I warned him yesterday morning, but since when have I been able to stop my brother from doing anything that he felt was required for a case? Now tell me about the shooter.'

John gave Mycroft a brief summary of events. He told him of their entry into the building and the office. He chose not to include the use of Janine, and Mycroft, who was flicking through the police reports while John was talking by the sound of it, chose not to ask. He told him of finding Janine and the security guard out cold on the floor, of Sherlock going upstairs to Magnussen's office, and of finding Sherlock collapsed on the floor some ten minutes later.'

'Nine minutes,' Mycroft murmured.

'What?'

'It was fourteen minutes between you and Sherlock entering the lift and your telephone call to Emergency Services. Allowing for the seventy five seconds that it takes for that lift to reach the top floor, the three minutes it would have taken you to walk through the office and discover the staff members on the floor, and the average of forty five seconds that it takes someone to contact emergency services when they discover a loved one collapsed, that leaves nine minutes unaccounted for.'

'Do we have to do this now, Mycroft?' John asked wearily.

'I'm on my way back,' Mycroft said in clipped tones. 'I should be there by this afternoon. I suppose I could contact Lestrade in the interim for the finer details, if there's nothing else that you can tell me about the shooter.'

'He was left-handed, we think, if that helps.'

'Who thinks?' Mycroft suddenly sounded interested.

'James MacPherson, the surgeon who operated on Sherlock, based on the bullet trajectory. It's an interesting theory, although...'

'I'll look into it,' Mycroft said, and then he was gone in his usual abrupt way.

'Thank you, John, for saving my brothers life - again. Thank you, John for keeping a vigil for him all night, not knowing if he was going to live or die. Thank you John, for turning your life upside down, yet again. No of course, fucking not!'

The cabby slid back the partition to the passenger compartment as they stopped in traffic, half turning to ask, 'You alright,mate?'

'Yeah, I'm fine. Sorry.' John mumbled, realising that he had been shouting at his phone.

'We'll have you home soon. Been at work have you?'

'You could say that,' John replied.

...

Mary must have known from his expression when he walked in, because the first thing she did when he walked through the door was enfold him in a huge hug. 'You reek of hospitals,' she said. 'What happened?'

'Sherlock-' he started, then shook his head as his voice started to crack. Mary pulled him over to the sofa and sat him down.

'Sherlock what? Did he get hurt? Is he okay?'

Mary looked tired too, he registered. She was dressed for work, make-up partly hiding the dark shadows under her eyes, but she looked pale beneath it, as if she'd hardly slept.

'Didn't you sleep?' he asked, trying to delay the moment when he'd have to tell her.

'I had a late night with Cath,' she said. ' Stupid really. You know what we're like when we get talking, and then I kept waking up to see if you were home yet. But stop changing the subject. Tell me what happened.'

'Sherlock got shot,' he said, looking down.

'What? John, no. What happened? Is he okay?'

'He's been in surgery most of the night. But he's alive. Just. He's on ITU at The London. Christ, Mary. I thought I was going to lose him again.'

Mary's face was a perfect image of loving concern, as she pulled him into her arms, and let him rest his head on her shoulder. 'I thought he was going to die,' he whispered, and she held him, and rocked him, and he fought back the urge to cry.

'Is it bad?' she asked when he finally pulled away, accepting a tissue from the box that she handed him and blowing his nose loudly. 'I mean, where did he get shot?'

'Right side of his chest, but the bullet ended up going through his IVC.'

Mary went so white that he thought she might faint. 'Hey, hey,' John said. 'He's okay, well he's not okay, but the odds are on his side now. It was getting him through surgery that was dicey.'

'But you said he got shot on the right side of his chest. The inferior vena cava is in the middle, isnt it - so how did that happen?'

'It was on the right side, but closer to the middle than I thought initially too. His damned shirt must have been slightly off centre. From where the wound was relative to the buttons I thought that it would be a simple lung injury too, but it wasn't. It was a proper mediastinal injury. The bullet just clipped the right ventricle, went through the IVC and missed his spinal cord by a couple of centimetres.'

He paused. 'You okay?' he asked, noticing that Mary's colour had gone from white to green. 'Back in a sec,' she said as she ran from the room.

Morning sickness. Of course. At eighteen weeks it was finally starting to abate, but it still took her by surprise at times.

'Sorry,' she said when she returned a few minutes later. 'The parasite is making it's presence felt again.'

'It's a beautiful parasite,' he said, putting a hand on her neat, and hardly noticeable bump. If you didn't know, you would hardly realise that she was pregnant.

'So is Sherlock going to be okay? Really? I mean, they repaired the damage? Is he going to have any long term consequences of that, do you know? Have they said?'

'Hey, slow down,' John said, reaching out her hand, feeling oddly as if he was comforting her. He'd known that she liked Sherlock, but he hadn't expected her to be quite so upset by him being hurt. 'He's alive. That's good enough for me at the moment. I thought he was going to die in the ambulance, or in the resus room in A&E, or in theatre. All of those looked very possible last night. But he's on ITU, and he's doing okay, and James, the cardiothoracic surgeon who I know from medical school is cautiously optimistic. We don't know what effect the prolonged drop in blood pressure will have on him in the long-term. I mean, he could have hypoxic brain injury, but lets just take it one step at a time.'

Mary pulled him into another hug. 'I'm sorry, John, I'm so sorry.'

'It's not exactly your fault, is it? But I appreciate the sentiment. Lestrade and his team are looking for the shooter, anyway. Let's hope they find him.'

'Any clues?'

'Not yet. He disappeared like a ghost. No DNA, no fingerprints, nothing.'

Mary nodded, thoughtfully. 'Professional job?'

'Looks like it.'

'Poor Sherlock,'she murmured. Then, 'Shall I run you a bath?'

'Don't you have to get to work? I don't want to make you late.'

'And leave you on your own after the night you've had? Not likely. I'll do a swap with Tracey. She's on admin this morning, I think. Good job you're on a day off. You going to cancel the rest of the week?'

'I don't know,' John said, running a hand through his hair, suddenly realising exactly how tired he was. 'Maybe. Depends what happens. I'll phone them later, get them to cut down on my clinic for tomorrow anyway, just in case somebody else does have to step in.'

He heard her on the phone while he was in the bath. 'All sorted?' he asked as he re-emerged into the bedroom, rubbing his hair dry with a towel.

'It's fine. I swapped my morning baby clinic for this afternoon's dressing one. I don't have to be in until two.'

'You swapped into a leg ulcer and stinky wounds clinic? You must really love me.'

'I must, mustn't I?'

And then she curled up with him in their perfect bed, arms tight around him, holding him as he fell asleep. And all he could think was, 'Thank God for Mary. Because even if I did lose Sherlock again, at least I'll have her. At least I'll always have her.'


	8. Chapter 8

He woke from an uneasy sleep several hours later. From the light filtering though the curtains it must have been late afternoon. There was a note from Mary on the pillow beside him. 'Gone to work. They've cancelled your clinics for the rest of the week. Give yourself a break, you've got enough to worry about. See you later, M x'

He smiled. His beautiful, beautiful wife. Pregnant with his child. He was fortunate, wasn't he? He should be counting his blessings. Wasn't this what he had always wanted? And then feeling guilty for that brief moment of contentment when Sherlock was still on the proverbial critical list, he checked his phone quickly for missed calls. There weren't any. Good. No news was good news, as they say. If he had deteriorated then they would have phoned him.

Sitting up in bed, he googled for the number of the Royal London, and got put through to intensive care. The news was good. Sherlock was stable. They were weaning down the inotropes. There hadn't been any rebleeding. John let out a breath that he hadn't realised that he'd been holding.

'Sherlock's brother came to see him,' the nurse said cautiously.

'Ah,' John said. 'I probably should have warned you about him.'

'He was very - forceful,' the nurse said. 'Especially about security.'

'He's very protective of Sherlock,' John said.'Did he talk to James, too?'

'Yes, he did. And to our intensive care consultant here, as well. And to the head of security at the hospital. Among others.'

'Sorry,' John said. 'And did he try to move Sherlock to a private facility somewhere?'

'He proposed it. He seemed slightly - put out, to discover that you had Power of Attorney. I suspect that he'll be in touch.'

'I'm surprised that he hasn't already,' John said dryly. 'So are there specific visiting hours? I was planning on coming in shortly.'

'Any time until ten o'clock this evening,'

'Then I'll be in in an hour or so.'  
...

Walking onto the intensive care unit that evening, he noticed the two plain clothes security men flanking the entrance doors. The ear pieces would have given them away as being part of Mycroft's team, even if their snappily cut suits hadn't. 'Good Evening, Dr Watson,' one of them said pleasantly, as he pressed the buzzer to be let into the unit.

He was shown into the relatives room, where he found James MacPherson deep in conversation with Mycroft. He looked somewhat relieved at John's entrance.

'Everything okay?' John asked.

'We were discussing the possibility of transferring Sherlock to another unit,' Mycroft said.

'For safety?' John asked, deciding it was wisest not to let in that the was aware that this was the second conversation of the day on this topic.

'Of course. I know of a secure, private hospital with intensive care facilities, which we could move Sherlock too as soon as Mr MacPherson is happy to sign the release papers.'

'And does the secure private hospital have a cardiothoracic surgeon on site 24/7?' John asked pleasantly.

'Well no, but I'm sure that-'

'Then he stays here,' John cut in. 'There's safety and safety, Mycroft. I think that the threat to Sherlock from rebleeding necessitating immediate further surgery, is greater at the moment than the chance of an assassin gaining access to him past all the layers of security that you've put in.'

'The shooter got into Magnussen's office despite all of his security.'

'But they weren't expecting him. Your men are. And besides, I don't for a second think that Sherlock was the intended target. He was after Magnussen. Sherlock was just the accidental victim.'

'Then explain to me, if you can, why Sherlock is the one lying in a hospital bed, while Magnussen remains virtually unscathed?' Mycroft said, apparently oblivious to James' presence. 'If Magnussen was the intended victim, then why not kill them both? Why shoot Sherlock and leave?'

'I don't know why,' John told him. 'But that's not the point. The fact remains that moving Sherlock from here would, in my opinion, be dangerous. James? What do you think?'

'I wouldn't advise it,' James said. 'In a few days, maybe, when he's off intensive care and is more stable, but not now.'

'Then that's settled,' John said, firmly. 'So how is he doing?'

'Pretty well, all things considered. We've been weaning down the inotropes, he's maintaining his blood pressure, the output from the pericardial drain has been minimal. If all goes well they're going to try to get him off the ventilator and wake him up tomorrow.'

'And neurologically? Any clues there?'

'No way of knowing until we try to wake him up, I'm afraid, but for what it's worth we did a CT head as part of a whole body scan earlier, and that was clear.'

'To check for other injuries?'

'Exactly. We would have done it last night, but he was too unstable.'

'To risk the doughnut of death?' John asked, remembering the old name for the CT scanner from his SHO days. Corridors and lifts were the most dangerous place in the hospital for an intensive care patient, let alone the scanner room itself. 'Of course. So just the thoracic injury then.'

'That's right. We did a bedside echo earlier too. Cardiac function is looking good, and that's backed up by his reduced need for inotropes. Renal function is starting to pick up. His kidneys took a fair knock from the drop in blood pressure, but we've got him on a renal dose of dopamine, and that's helping.'

John caught Mycroft's set expression out of the corner of his eye. He doesn't have a clue what we're talking about, he realised. But he's too proud to ask for an explanation.

'So you're going to be able to avoid haemofiltration do you think?' he continue. Let Mycroft be on the back foot for a while. It made a nice change.

'Looks like it,' James said.

'Good,' John said. 'That's good. It's very good in fact. So now we just have to see if he wakes up.'

'Exactly.'

John nodded. 'So is that you finished for the day?' he asked.

'Certainly is. Switchboard have got my number though. I've asked them to contact me direct and not the on-call if there are any problems with Sherlock.'

'Did you contact your parents?' John asked Mycroft after James had left.

'No.'

'You mean you couldn't, or you decided not to.'

'John, believe me, it is better for my mother not to know until the danger is past.'

'But surely..'

'Sherlock and I agreed long ago, that if either of us was either temporarily incapacitated, we would prefer not to have our parents - concerned - until after the event.'

'You mean you don't want your mother flapping.'

'She can do nothing, John. Why ruin her holiday?'

'Of course - they're in the States aren't they. And your father? Are you going to tell him?'

'My father is more - saguine. I would tell him if I thought that he could keep the information from my mother. However, in the circumstances, it seems wise to allow them to remain in ignorance.'

'But you would have told them about Sherlock's drug use.'

'Only because I felt they could bring some useful pressure to bear on the situation. Speaking of which, you may find this interesting.'

He slid a lab report across to John. The results of Sherlock's toxicology report. Heroin, cocaine, ketamine. He groaned. 'They shouldn't have given this to you, Mycroft. It should have been confidential.'

'They didn't give it to me. I procured it via - other means. Are you surprised by the results?'

'Not really, no. Is this what he used before?'

'The ketamine is new. I was aware that he'd dabbled in the past with various pharmaceutical substances, although heroin and cocaine were always his drugs of choice. So what do you suggest that we do about this, John?'

'He's intubated on intensive care, Mycroft. I doubt that he's going to be able to access drugs from here. When he wakes up, then we'll have to address it with him, I presume. He said it was for a case, though, didn't he? Isn't that possible - that it's just for the case?'

'Three drugs, John? One might have been enough to convince Magnussen. Even witnesses to the action of him buying drugs, of frequenting those places that they can be obtained would have been enough. There was no need for him to actually take them. Two drugs would speak of indulgence, but three? Three drugs to me spells addiction. Again.'

'They cut heroin with ketamine all the time though, don't they?' John said, wondering why he felt the need to defend Sherlock. 'He might not have known what he was taking.'

Mycroft raised an elegant eyebrow. 'This is Sherlock Holmes, we're talking about, John. Do you honestly believe that is possible.'

John swore softly under his breath. 'Let's just take this one step at a time, shall we? Get him off intensive care first, then we can find out exactly how deep this goes.'

...

Sherlock looked slightly better when he went in to see him. Less pale, although that was no doubt partly helped by the bag of blood hanging up by his bed.

'Haemoglobin was 8.6 when we rechecked it,' the intensive care nurse told him. We're topping him up by a couple of units.'

There was still a trickle of blood into the chest drain, John noticed, but the dressing across Sherlock's chest looked dry and clean. 'May I?' he asked, indicating Sherlock's charts, clipped to the stand at the end of the bed.

'Of course,' the nurse said. 'Mr MacPherson has told us to share any information with you that you need.'

The numbers were looking good, although John could see that the previous night certainly hadn't been all plain sailing. Sherlock was being well looked after, that was clear. But John had seen too many patients deteriorate at Day 2 or 3 post-operatively to be counting his chickens yet. The road to recovery would be far from easy, he was only too aware of that from his own experience. Medical complications aside, getting well required patience, and that was one quality that Sherlock rarely exhibited. John predicted tantrums and set backs, and all of these he was more than happy to cope with. If Sherlock would just wake up and start grumbling about how bored he was, then John would know that he was on the mend.

The drugs - the drugs were something else entirely. Despite his reassurances to Mycroft, John had no idea how deep this addiction went, if an addiction it already was. John still had problems believing that, but the large doses of fentanyl that the staff had been having to use to keep Sherlock comfortable spoke a different story. They were two or three times that which John would have expected for a man of his age and build, suggesting that Sherlock had built up quite a tolerance to opiates. Had he been using for the whole of the month since John had last seen him? And did that, perhaps, explain why he had been avoiding him? John had been waiting for his text, summoning him to help on a case, but his phone had been strangely silent. His phone calls had gone unanswered, and when he had dropped in on 221B, Mrs Hudson had invariably told him that Sherlock was out.

So why did John feel so guilty? He couldn't help but feel that he had been a poor friend to Sherlock since his marriage, and even before, since his return. Having him as best man had helped. Sherlock had thrown himself so headlong into wedding plans, no wedding organiser could ever have been more dedicated. Mary had told him that it was all about control - Sherlock felt uncomfortable with the position of best man, and more so with the position of best friend that John had presented him with, and so he overcompensated by micromanaging everything. Models of the venue. Napkin folding, for heavens sake. John should have known that something was wrong at that point.

After the wedding - after the honeymoon, things had seemed off kilter somehow. He couldn't persuade Sherlock to visit their new house out in Kew (Mary, it turned out, had inherited a tidy sum from her parents, enough for the deposit on a small house in a reasonable area. Far nicer than anything he could have afforded on his own). He had seen him a couple of times when they had got back from honeymoon, but since then - nothing until he had found him in that squat the previous should have tried harder, should have contacted Mycroft, maybe, but if he was honest with himself, he had enjoyed the respite. He hadn't expected getting married to change anything, but it had, or maybe the baby had. Either way domesticity was surprisingly enjoyable. Did he miss the excitement of the cases? He hadn't thought so. Not until that morning, when suddenly going to rescue Isaac from that place had seemed like the best idea in the world. Sherlock was right, he had enjoyed it. He had missed it.

'You'd better wake up soon, you annoying bastard, or I'm going to start getting myself into even more trouble on my own,' he told Sherlock. Odd to have him so quiet, so unresponsive. Even during those long periods of silence in 221b, Sherlock had never been as motionless and still as this. It was unnerving somehow. The profound silence, broken only by the beeping of the cardiac monitor, showing less ectopic beats today, John was pleased to note, and by the hiss and click of the ventilator.

'And thanks for leaving me to deal with your brother on my own, too. You're in trouble, by the way, but I'll tell you about that when you're feeling a bit better. The good news is that he hasn't told your parents yet, so you won't get your mother weighing in - not yet anyway.'

'Oh and a card arrived for you. From one Charles Augustus Magnussen. Wishing you a speedy recovery - the cheek of the bloke - and a quote, 'When one man strikes at the heart of another, he rarely misses.' What does that mean do you think? You'd better wake up Sherlock, and tell us what happened and why. Because Mycroft is dead set at finding out who shot you, and I know you'd hate it if he worked it out before you woke up to tell us why we've got it all wrong.'

'He's trying to work out why the shooter targeted you and left Magnussen with nothing more than a nasty bump on his head.' John's brain was working overtime as he talked, but he continued to think aloud. 'But he didn't exactly target you, did he? Two bullets to the chest and one to the head, that's what we were taught in the army. That's how to kill somebody. So unless I disturbed the shooter, then why not do it properly? Why shoot you once in the chest and leave it at that?'

John sighed. There was so much information going round in his head, he had no idea what to do with it all. 'Please wake up, Sherlock. I need you to help me work all of this out. Because I can't help feeling that there's much more to this than a bungled burglary, or someone trying to get to Magnussen. None of this makes sense, and you know that I'm crap at working through this stuff on my own.'


	9. Chapter 9

The news from Lestrade hadn't been hopeful. The shooter had disappeared like a ghost, leaving no forensic trace of his presence. Even Mycroft's team had been unable to discover much more than the signs of the intruders entry and exit from the helipad doors above, nothing more.

John had racked his memory banks for anything that could help Lestrade; any clues, however small, from his brief time in Magnussen's office; things that he might have seen, or heard, and subsequently discounted. He had tried Sherlock's visualisation techniques, closing his eyes, imagining every step of his journey with Sherlock from the lift shaft up, through the office, finding Janine and the security guard, going up the stairs, finding Sherlock and Magnussen in the office, but there was nothing new that he could add to his previous statement. He envied Sherlock his perfect memory, apparently unaffected by emotion. When John tried to remember the evening of the shooting, all he felt was the fear and panic of finding Sherlock lying unresponsive on the ground.

'Stop torturing yourself,' Mary told him. 'It was a random hit by the sound of it. What does it matter?'

'It matters to Mycroft,' John said dryly. 'You think he's going to let whoever did this to Sherlock walk free, Mary?'

'If they're as good as you say that they are then he may not have any choice.'

'But it's odd, isn't it?' he asked her. 'As Mycroft says, why shoot Sherlock, but leave Magnussen unscathed?'

'Maybe Magnussen still had something that they wanted?' she said. 'You don't shoot someone before you've got what you came for. Anyway, why are we talking about this again? Cup of tea?'

So what did the shooter come for, John wondered, as Mary went into the kitchen to make the tea. Secrets, he presumed, no great challenge in working that one out. If it had been an assassination attempt, then it was unlikely that Sherlock's presence would have prevented it. Which left someone trying to reclaim their secrets. And goodness knows there were enough people out there who wanted that. Nothing like narrowing down the field.

His sleep that night was again interrupted by dreams of Sherlock - falling, bleeding, dying. Dreams that woke him up sweating and shaking, trying not to disturb Mary, sleeping peacefully beside him. Because she needed her sleep, and because what he felt he had no desire to put into words at this point in time. And there was something else, a half-recovered memory from his dream, of Sherlock muttering about perfumes in Magnussen's office. Claire de Lune, he had mentioned Claire de Lune. A perfume - and the musical signal that the French Resistance fighters had used to identify each other in WWII. Was there a clue in that? What else could it mean? Who else wore that perfume, other that Mary? Sherlock had thought that he knew who the intruder was. How could he have forgotten that? And he had identified them from perfume. A woman? Could a woman have done this? Who would have? He could think of only one woman from their encounters who could have done this, and she was long gone, beheaded in Karachi. Or was she? Could Irene Adler have been behind this once again? But if so, then why would she have shot Sherlock?

Abandoning sleep, he got up and pulling his dressing gown round him, padded into the kitchen to make yet another cup if tea. What was it with tea and the British in a time of crisis? It gave your hands something to do, and then your brain something to concentrate on as you drank it. Even the warmth of the mug was comforting as you held it. He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece - 5.30am. He considered calling Lestrade, as soon as it became a more reasonable hour, telling him about the perfume, but it sounded crazy even as he rehearsed the sentence. How could a woman have done this? Why would they have?

He fell into an uneasy doze on the sofa, lulled by the low murmur on the television, and was woken by Mary some time later with a crick in his neck and the low throb of a headache.

'I thought that you were going in to see Sherlock at half nine?' she said, as she turned the television over to the breakfast news,

'I was, I mean I am,' he said, looking at his watch. 'Christ, I'd better get a move on. I've got an appointment to talk to the James and the ITU Consultant about where we go from here. Are you coming?'

'Do you want me to?' she asked. She still looked tired, John registered. 'No, you stay here and put your feet up,' he said. 'I'll tell you what they say later.'

It was a long journey on the tube from Richmond to Whitechapel, although thankfully he was deprived of the necessity of changing lines, and was able to remain in his precious seat, still holding his now empty paper coffee cup, as the carriage filled at Victoria, and then re-emptied again after Westminster. He was just congratulating himself on the fact that he might get there in time after all, when the tannoy announced that the train would terminate after the next stop, due to a temporary suspension of service. He knew what that meant. A jumper under the train. It depended on the sensibilities of the announcer as to whether they declared the true nature of the problem or not, and when they did, it was often with an edge of irritation, as if frustrated at the selfishness of the person driven to that desperate act. It was the tube drivers that John felt sorry for. It must be what they all dreaded - seeing a body launched from the platform, slamming on the brakes, knowing that they couldn't stop in time, but trying all the same. Mind the Gap. Sometimes people wanted to fall into the gap, and there was nothing that anybody could do about that.

He joined the scrum of people leaving the train, and emerged into the September sunshine at Mansion House. 9.05am. Time to find a cab if he was going to stand any chance of getting to the hospital in time for his appointment. Appointments could always be postponed, of course, but the army had instilled in him a deep sense of propriety and punctuality. He preferred to keep his appointments if he could,

Checking his phone for messages, as he walked towards the main road to find a taxi, he discovered a missed call from a withheld number, received no doubt while he had been in the deeper parts of the tube network. There was also a voice mail from one of the ITU nurses, asking him to call her back. Fuck. This couldn't be good. He selected the number from his contact list rapidly, but it rang out. Trying again, the phone was eventually answered by a ward clerk, who could only tell him that all of the nurses were busy and ask him to call back later. In the background he could hear the familiar beeping of a monitor, followed by the shouted 'stand clear' of a cardiac arrest.

John thanked the receptionist, and put the phone down, fighting back the sensation of panic and the familiar dizziness that came with it. The phone call - the missed phone call must have been to tell him that Sherlock had deteriorated. It was his cardiac arrest that John has heard in the background, he was sure of it.

And he was too late, he was going to be too late. Breaking into a run, he headed for the nearest taxi rank, trying to flag down any available taxis as he went. He phoned Mary as soon as he had climbed into the front cab in the rank and given the cabbie the hospital as his destination.

'What is it?' she asked, answering it on the first ring.

'I don't know for sure - but I got a missed call from ITU while I was on the tube. They wouldn't talk to me when I phoned back, but I could hear an arrest going on in the background. Mary - I think, I mean I could be wrong, but I think -'

'I'm on my way,' she said. I'll meet you there.

'No you don't have to. Stay there, until we know.'

'I'm coming, John. I don't want you to have to deal with this on your own.'

'Then get a cab. The tubes are down. Someone jumped in front of a train at Cannon Street, by the sound of it, and the line's shut from there. I'm in a cab heading to The London now.'

'I'll be there as quickly as I can,' Mary told him.

Fifteen minutes later, John was sprinting up the stairs to ITU, and as he'd expected was met at the door and escorted into the relatives room by one of the nurses to wait. That bloody lake picture again. If he ever had to see that picture again after this was all over he'd...

Anger. He remembered the anger from before. Remembered the hours he had spent at the gym, thumping punch bags bounding on the treadmill, trying desperately to channel it, of he couldn't repress it. His hands clenched into fists as he concentrated on trying to slow his breathing. 'You see what you do to me Sherlock? ' he wanted to say. 'You see why I try to distance myself from you, to try to have a normal life. Because every time you pitch up, then sooner or later I end up like this.'

He wanted Mary to be here, to be with him to hear whatever it was that they were going to say, but it was too late. The door was opening, and the ITU consultant that he recognised from the previous day and one of the nurses were coming into the room, and he didn't want to hear whatever it was that they had to say. That they had done all that they could, but that despite the drugs and the compressions his heart had stopped, and all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't get it started again.

He braced himself for it. But they didn't say that. They didn't say that at all. What they did say was that Sherlock had woken up. They had done a sedation hold that morning, and within thirty minutes he had started breathing for himself, opened his eyes and tried to talk. They had removed the endotracheal tube that he no longer needed, and he had tried to talk to them. 'He got very agitated,' the ITU consultant told John. 'We had to sedate him again to stop him pulling out his lines. He kept saying Mary, over and over again, just that one name, Who is Mary? His girlfriend?'

'No,' John said stupidly, shaking his head. 'Mary is my wife.' The consultant and the ITU nurse looked at each other, and John smiled slightly at their discomfort. 'No, really,' he said. 'It's nothing like that. But how odd, are you sure that's what he said?'

'No mistaking it,' the nurse said. 'It was just that name, until we sedated him again. We thought he might find it easier with someone he knew here, patients often do. That's why I called you. We thought that if you were happy to sit with him for a while, we could try turning down the sedation again, see how he does. He might still be confused, of course, it might not work, but we'd like to wake him up if we can.'

It didn't take long, not long at all. Ten short minutes perhaps, between the midazolam infusion being turned off and Sherlock opening his eyes, blinking, and then staring at John for several minutes, as if trying to confirm who he was, blinking as he struggled to focus on him.

'John,' he said finally, his voice hoarse from the recent removal of the tube.

'Morning,' John said, with a smile that betrayed some of his relief.

Sherlock looked past John at the partition wall that separated his bed space from that of the patient next door, then turned his head to the other side to take in the mass of machinery, and looked at John questioningly, licking his cracked lips.

'Here,' John said, lifting up the plastic cup of water he had been provided with, angling the straw so that Sherlock could take a grateful sip of water. 'Not too much though or I'll get told off.'

'You're in Intensive Care at The London,' he said, as he put the cup back down again.

Sherlock blinked as if trying to clear his head, but remained silent.

'You got shot, Sherlock,' John said bluntly. 'You nearly died.'

'Mary,' Sherlock said, slowly.

'Christ, what is it with you and my wife?' John said with a smile. 'They said that her name was the first thing that you said when you woke up. She's on her way over to see you.'

Sherlock closed his eyes and coughed once, again, then the cough turned into a spasm that sent the saturation monitor alarming, and had the ITU nurse sitting him bolt upright in the bed and placing an oxygen mask over his face in addition to the nasal oxygen that he was already receiving. His eyes flew open, as his face reflected the pain that the unexpected movement caused in his surgical wound. The nurse pressed the boost button on the fentanyl infusion, and within minutes he was resting back, breathing settling, his face calm again.

'Surgery?' he asked John, when he finally opened his eyes again.

'Bilateral thoracotomies. Sorry about that. Going to be sore for a while. No running around for you for a few months.'

'Sorry,' Sherlock said, and then closed his eyes and with seconds was asleep.

'Nice to see you too,' John muttered, but he couldn't stop the grin spreading over his face, Sherlock was back. He was going to be okay. Everything was going to be fine. He would be able to tell them who had shot him, and everything would be - fine.


	10. Chapter 10

Walking off the unit for a breath of fresh air some time later, he saw Mary running up the stairs, as soon as he walked out the door. She looked worried. He had forgotten in all of his relief - he'd forgotten that she cared about Sherlock too and would have been just as worried as he had been.

'He's only bloody woken up,' John told her, as soon as she was within hearing distance 'He's pulled through.'

'Really? Seriously?'

'But you, Mrs Watson, you're in big trouble.'

'Really? Why?'

'His first word when he woke up? 'Mary!''

He laughed at her expression of bemusement, and when she hugged him, he felt an echo of his own overwhelming sense of relief. Sherlock was going to be okay. He was alive. There was no greater gift than this.

'Can I go in to see him?' Mary asked as she finally pulled away. 'If he's been asking for me?'

John shook his head. 'He's asleep again. Later though, you could go back and see him later.'

'I might just do that,' Mary said.

...

John and Mary went for surprisingly good coffee in the ubiquitous coffee shop in the foyer, then went back to see Sherlock. He was still asleep, and looked likely to remain so for some time.

'I might pop into work,' John told Mary. 'Just for a few hours. I've got some admin to catch up on.'

'Appease the guilt a bit, you mean?' Mary said.

'It's what the NHS is based on isn't it?' John said with a grin. 'Guilt and good-will. Without that, the whole thing would crumble. What are you going to do for the rest of the day?'

'Bit of shopping maybe. I'm bursting out of all of my clothes. Might have to bite the bullet and buy some fat person ones.'

'Maternity clothes, you mean, I believe that's the technical term.'

'What I said. See you back here later?'

'Absolutely. I should be finished by four, so see you back here fiveish? Then we could go for dinner in Chinatown afterwards.'

'Perfect,' she said kissing him. And then they walked hand in hand to the tube station, where he took left Mary to take the Jubilee line towards Covent Garden, while he took the District and Circle back to the surgery.

John spent a pleasant afternoon at the surgery. As a locum he had been concerned that he might have blotted his copybook by taking time off, but his colleagues greeted his return with genuine pleasure, and he was brought endless cups of coffee as he ploughed through the stacks of results, and correspondence that had piled up in his absence. He left a little after four with a clear conscience, and a promise to return bright and early on Monday, for the joys of the usual post-weekend packed surgery.

Arriving back at The London, he texted Mary, and was checking his phone for a reply, when he bumped into her coming out of Intensive Care.

'I thought you were going to wait for me?' he said, surprised.

'I got here early, got bored of shopping. Turns out maternity clothes are all stuck in the 1970's - did you know that? I mean, they genuinely still have dungarees in those places. What's that all about? So, rather than depress myself even further by buying normal clothes that I won't be able to fit into for the next six months, I thought I might as well come back and see if Sherlock was awake.'

'So you've seen him.'

'Briefly. He seems pretty doped up, John. What on earth have they got him on?'

'Fentanyl, I think. And then all of the propofol and midazolam that they've had him on will still be floating round in his system. Did he talk to you?'

'Not really. He said my name, looked a bit confused, and then went back to sleep.'

'Did they update you on how he was doing?'

'I didn't ask too much. I thought I'd wait for you." She bit her lip, 'He looks like crap, John,' she said quietly. 'So many tubes, and drains, and -'

'Hey, hey,' he said, pulling her into a hug, 'He'll be okay. He'll be fine now. You know that.'

'What if he'd died John?'

'But he didn't,' John murmured into her hair, still holding her close. 'You can't live with 'what ifs' Mary, they'll drive you mad. I was the world expert at those, remember? You can only deal with the here and now. And Sherlock is alive, and he's going to get better. And that's all that any of us need to know for now.'

Mary nodded and pulled away. 'You're right, you're right,' she said. 'I just - don't like hospitals. Too many bad memories.'

'You're a nurse!' John said. 'How can you not like hospitals?'

'Hence my decision to work in the community,' she said. 'But I mean I don't like them from the other side. From the patient and relative side.'

Mary didn't like talking about her parents, about what had happened to them, but John knew that her bad memories of hospitals were related to their deaths seven years ago, only six months apart. But there was likely to be another need for a hospital visit in the next few months. Now probably wasn't the time to address that, but - sod it.

'So...,' he said, staring meaningfully at her bump.

'Home birth,' she said briskly. 'Don't mind do you?' Then with a smirk. 'I though we could install one of those giant inflatable birthing pools in the middle of the living room and get an underwater video camera. Actually that's not a bad idea...'

She laughed at his expression of horror. 'I'm joking John. Truth is, I haven't really thought about it. We can talk about it at another time. Look do you mind if I head home? I'm tired, too much shopping, I think, and I don't think I really want to see Sherlock again like that. Not today, anyway'

'No, of course not. Take a cab though will you? You look tired.'

'There's a thin line between concern and control, you know that?' she said, then kissing him on the cheek. 'I'm pregnant, not ill. I'll be fine on the tube. I'll see you later.'

Sherlock was still sleeping when he got back to the unit, so he went to find James in his office for an update. The news was good. The pericardial drain was out, there was no evidence of any further bleeding, the chest drain was clamped and could probably come out the next day. He was off inotropes, and his renal function was picking up. It was all very much going the right way.

'We've got him into a side room on the unit,' James said. 'But if all goes well, we could get him into the private wing tomorrow.'

'That soon?' John asked, surprised.

'No reason to keep him on here once we're sure that he's stable off the ventilator and the inotropes. We'd normally suggest 24 hours in HDU as a step down, but, well Sherlock's brother is extremely keen, shall we say, for Sherlock to be moved to a private room.'

'Security again?'

'He has - concerns, shall we say, about the number of people coming in and out of the critical care complex.'

'And has he suggested putting lights and sound into the room you've got lined up for Sherlock yet?'

'I believe that it's been suggested,' James said wryly, '- and thankfully rejected in no uncertain terms by our head of security as an unacceptable invasion of privacy. The security guards on the door to the unit, and the ones he's got lined up to stand outside Sherlock's door once he's on the private wing should be enough. Still, under the circumstances, his concern isn't exactly surprising. Any news on the identity of the shooter?'

'Not really,' John said. 'Nothing concrete anyway. The police are still working on the assumption that Sherlock was the accidental victim.'

'But you're not so sure?' James asked.

'Sherlock doesn't believe in chance,' John said. 'Nor do I. I'm just hoping that when he's a bit more awake, he'll be able to tell us himself.'

'His brother tried that earlier,' James said. 'No joy. He's fairly sleepy on the doses of fentanyl that he's needing to keep him comfortable though. We're going to switch to morphine overnight, see how he does on that.'

'Is that wise?' John asked. 'With the history of abuse, I mean. What about a thoracic epidural, would that be an option?'

'It's still opiates, though. And given how close the bullet tract came to the spinal cord, I'd rather not if we can avoid it. There's no evidence of any neurological damage that we can tell, but we'd rather know if he's going to run into any problems.'

'Haematoma?' John asked, his brain clicking through the possibilities.

'It's unlikely at this point, nothing showed on the CT on day one, but with an injury like that, the risk of delayed bleeding is always there. The morphine as a background infusion and a PCA is our safest bet.'

'You do realise that he'll have the code on the pump cracked, and be turning up the infusion rate himself within about three minutes?' John said. 'Better be prepared to think laterally.'

...

Walking into ITU ten minutes later, he found Mycroft sitting next to Sherlock's bed. Sherlock was lying still, eyes closed, breathing slow and even, pretending to be asleep. John wondered if Mycroft was fooled.

'Still asleep?' John asked.

'Apparently so.'

'Did you get any sense out of him?'

'He woke up briefly earlier, acknowledged my presence, and then strangely enough when I asked him about the identity of the shooter, he became overtaken by drowsiness, and has remained uncommunicative ever since.'

'Ah.' John said,

'Ah, indeed.' Mycroft looked at his watch. 'I have a meeting to attend. See what you can get out of him will you, John, and let me know if he chooses to divulge anything? I would worry less were the identity of the perpetrator known. But my brother will, I suspect remain as intransigent as ever.'

'Perhaps he doesn't remember.'

'And perhaps he does. Now that would be more interesting, wouldn't it?'

'He's gone,' John said, a few minutes later, standing up slightly, and peering round the door to watch Mycroft's receding figure exit through the door to the unit. 'You can stop pretending now.'

But when he turned back to the bed, he found a pair of grey-green eyes already watching him.

'How did you know?' Sherlock's voice was dazed and sleepy, that much wasn't a pretence. But he looked better than he had the previous day, less pale. More like his normal self.

'That you weren't asleep? I've spent hours watching you sleep, Sherlock. And hours watching you lying immobile but awake on the sofa. I know the difference. So, it would appear does Mycroft.'

'He wasn't sure though.'

'No, he wasn't, John said with a grin. 'So was that just to piss him off, or-'

'Didn't want to talk.' Sherlock's words were slightly slurred from the drugs. He shifted slightly in the bed, pushing down with his arms to try to move his torso while keeping it as straight as possible, but still he winced in pain, and John noticed both the increased rate in his breathing and the cardiac monitor recording an increased heart rate.

'Are you in pain?' he asked. 'I'll get the nurse, she's just outside.'

'Boost button,' Sherlock gasped, as he lay as still as possible, eyes squeezed shut. John recognised that pose. It was the position that you assumed when knew that the slightest movement would cause you pain. John reached over and pressed the boost button on the fentanyl infusion, watching both Sherlock's face and the cardiac monitor, and observing the swift effects of the fentanyl. The morphine that they were planning to switch him to wouldn't be as fast. How would he cope with that, he wondered.

'Better?' he asked a few minutes later.

Sherlock nodded slightly. 'Bad?' he asked, when he finally opened his eyes again.

'What?'

Sherlock indicated the equipment with his head. 'All this - where did the bullet go?'

'Inferior vena cava,' John said. 'Clipped a bit of lung on the way. Bad enough.'

'I saw Moriarty,' Sherlock said drowsily.

'What?' John felt as if the room temperature had suddenly dropped ten degree.s How was that possible? Had Moriarty faked his death too? Had he somehow been the one who shot Sherlock?

'Moriarty shot you?'

'No, of course not. I don't remember who shot me.I don't remember seeing anyone in that room other than Magnussen.'

'So how could you have seen Moriarty? Sherlock, he's dead - isn't he?'

'Of course he's dead, John,' Sherlock said, his words becoming increasingly more slurred as he slid towards sleep. 'But then so was I.'


	11. Chapter 11

John tried to ask Sherlock what he meant by his comment about Moriarty, but there was no waking him. He debated asking the nurses to turn the fentanyl down, reverse it even, so that he could double-check what he had meant, but the meaning had been clear. Sherlock hadn't seen Moriarty in the physical world, he had seen him in his mind when he was lying in that half-land between life and death. Heaven or hell, John wondered. Which did Moriarty represent to Sherlock?

John waited by Sherlock's bed for another hour or so, but he showed no signs of waking again, and so with a nod to Mycroft's guards on the door, John made his way back to the main entrance of the hospital. Pulling his phone out of his pocket as he went he found a text from Mary. 'Got an SOS call from Cath. Neil is being an arse again. Heading over there to offer tea and sympathy. Will pick up a take away on my way back, but could be some time M x.'

As soon as John had set foot outside the hospital, his phone rang. Mycroft, of course. John glanced up at the nearby CCTV cameras, wondering if he was being watched, and then realised that there was a far more simple solution. The security guards must have alerted him to John leaving the unit, and he was phoning for an update.

'He doesn't remember anything about the shooting, Mycroft,' John said as soon as he picked up the phone.

'You mean that is what he told you. Tell me what he said, word for word.'

John recounted the crux of his conversation with Sherlock to Mycroft, omitting the part about faking sleep, and hesitating before mentioning Moriarty.

'All of it, John,' Mycroft said with his usual edge of irritation. And John found himself recounting the Moriarty comment.

'James Moriarty is dead,' Mycroft said calmly. 'I saw the body myself. There was no doubt.'

'You saw Irene Adler's body too - the first time.'

'The circumstances that time were different.'

'So there is no chance...'

'None.'

'Only forgive me, but people do tend to have a habit of coming back from the dead in the circles that you move in.'

'Whoever shot Sherlock, John, it certainly wasn't James Moriarty.'

'So we're no closer to knowing who shot him?'

'Oh I wouldn't say that.'

John sighed wearily, leaned against the entrance to the underground station and squeezed the bridge of his nose. 'What do you know, Mycroft?' he asked.

'Tell me one thing, John. Do you honestly believe my brother when he says he doesn't remember who shot him?'

'I don't know.' John said. 'But why would he lie?'

'Why indeed?' Mycroft said, and then with a click he was gone.

'Mycroft - what-' John started, but there was just the dialling tone. John let out a string of swear words that earned him a dirty look from a woman struggling to get a small child and a baby and a buggy down the steps to the station. In an attempt to redeem himself, John muttered, 'Sorry, bad day,' grabbed the front of the buggy and helped her down the steps with it, earning himself a smile, and a small step towards restoring karma.

He hesitated at the junction between the corridor to the District and Circle and that to the Jubilee line for several minutes, not wanting to face the empty house with all of those thoughts going round and round in his head again. Eventually, he took the steps towards the Jubilee line and Baker Street. Now that Sherlock was awake, he'd be wanting some things from home. His pyjamas, his beloved dressing gown, his phone charger, a toothbrush, shaving stuff.

'He knows,' a quiet voice in his head said. It sounded horribly like Irene Adler. 'Mycroft knows and he's not telling you. Now why would that be?'

Shut up, he told it, because another voice was creeping in, his own, and that said the thing that has been puzzling him all along. Why shoot Sherlock once in the chest and leave it at that? If the intruder had wanted to kill him, then why not shoot him in the head, and if they didn't want to kill him - then why shoot him in the chest at all? Why not aim for another, less perilous site? John could make no sense of it, none whatsoever.

Mrs Hudson was in the hallway within seconds of John's key turning in the lock, and John realised guiltily that nobody had updated her on Sherlock's progress. As far as she knew, he was still lying unconscious on ITU.

'Hello, Mrs. H,' he said. 'Good news. Sherlock's going to be okay, we think. He's woken up.'

'Oh I know,' she said. 'That nice young lady who works for Mycroft has been keeping me updated. You'll be wanting to pick up some things for him, I suppose. I've ironed him some pyjamas, and got his leather holdall down for you. Folded up his second best dressing gown. I wasn't sure what else he'd need.'

'That's fine, I can sort the rest out,' John said.

'Is he really going to be okay John?' she asked. 'I mean, these things can make people go a bit, well, funny, sometimes. Does he seem - normal, well not normal obviously, but does he seem like Sherlock?'

'He's still very groggy,' John said, 'but yes, he still seems to be firing on all cylinders. I think he's going to be fine.'

'Good,' she said, following him up the stairs. 'Well come on then, let's get his things together for him. I've made him some mince pies too, he always liked those. Thought you could take them in to him.'

'It's September, Mrs H,' John said.

'Yes, well. They're about the only thing I bake that he'll reliably eat. Thought he might need something to tempt his appetite.'

Being in 221b without Sherlock was - odd. It reminded John uncomfortably of those days after Sherlocks presumed death when he had sat there for hours, addressing Sherlock's empty chair, trying to make sense of it all. He hadn't been able to bear the aching void left by Sherlock's absence. He had seen him everywhere in those early days; seen him sitting at the kitchen table, performing one of his blasted experiments, seen him sitting in his chair when he had walked into the living room, heard his tread on the stair, his slam of the door. He had seen him on street corners, in cafés, in taxi cabs. It had almost been enough to make him believe in ghosts. Moving out had been easier than living with the constant reminders. New flat, new life, burying the past. And now? And now Sherlock was back, but he had moved on and he almost wished - almost wished that it could all just go back to the way that it had been before. If he had been here, would Sherlock have cooked up the plan to use Janine to get to Magnussen? Would he have ended up in that crack den? John thought not.

'John?' came Mrs Hudson's tentative voice from behind him.

'Sorry, Mrs H, I was just-'

'Bad memories, of course, there must be. But he'll be back, John, of course he will be. It's not like before,'

'Did you know?' John asked curiously, realising the oddness of Mrs Hudson never having rented the flat out again while Sherlock was gone. Two years, for two years she had left it empty. She had boxed up some of Sherlock's things, in the first couple of weeks after his presumed death, but there it had ended. John had found himself unable to help and had told her to consult Mycroft to see what should happen to his possessions. Something must have stopped her clearing the flat. And the rent - there was the other odd thing. She might say that she couldn't bear to rent it out to someone else, but the rent from her flat was a large chunk of her income, John knew, how had she been able to afford to leave it empty?

'No,' Mrs Hudson said. 'I didn't know.'

'But the flat?' John asked. 'You left it virtually untouched.'

'That was Mycroft's suggestion,' she explained. 'He offered to pay the rent - all of it, that is, if I preferred to leave it as it was and not rent it out again.'

'Did he say why?'

'He said he might have need of it again one way. He wouldn't say anything else.'

'Oh.' John said with a frown, realising that Mrs Hudson had had what he hadn't - she had had hope. 'So you DID sort of know.'

'Not for sure John. I just - hoped. Killing himself wasn't really Sherlock's style was it? He was always so full if life, so positive, well apart from his down days of course. It just didn't seem like something he would do.'

'And what did you mean the rest of the rent?' John asked, suddenly picking up on her earlier comment. 'You mean my half? Did Mycroft pay Sherlock's half before?'

Mrs Hudson looked uncomfortable. 'Oh come on Mrs H. The cat is well and truly out of the bag now.'

'The rent, John. Did you really think you'd get a flat in central London for six hundred pounds a month?'

'Sherlock said that you owed him a favour.'

'I'm very fond of Sherlock, dear, as you know. But I couldn't afford that sort of favour.'

'So what - Mycroft topped up the rent? Did Sherlock know about that?'

'Of course not. You know what Sherlock's like, John. He thinks that things just sort of happen. His clothes miraculously pick themselves up off the floor and end up washed and folded back in his drawer, milk appears in the fridge, bills get paid. He doesn't really live in the same world as the rest of us does he? I'me always surprised that he carries money at all - like the Queen. Do you know that she never carries money? Doesn't have to, of course.'

'So - Mycroft paid you to let us both live here?' John asked, desperately trying to bring the conversation back on track. And paid you to look after Sherlock.'

'Not paid dear, no. Just - contributed to his expenses.'

'Did he pay you to spy on him too - no I don't mean spy, I mean to report back?'

'John Watson, what sort of person do you think that I am? Of course not!'

'Did he offer? Because he tried it with me too, you know, when I first said I was going to move in.'

'Oh of course he tried, but I'm not scared by the likes of Mycroft Holmes. I told him that I would keep a motherly eye on Sherlock, make sure that his washing was done, his shirts were ironed, the flat was kept clean, that sort of thing, but that was the end of it.'

'And you did keep an eye on him, Mrs H,' John said softly. 'We both did.'

'Wasn't enough to stop him going back on the drugs though, was it?' Mrs Hudson said with a sigh.

'You knew about that? I mean before the other day?'

'I suspected, John. You learn to recognise the signs. I was going to mention it to you, next time, I saw you, but - well, it's been a while, hasn't it. And I wasn't sure. If I'd been sure I would have called. Of course I would.'

'He says it's all for a case,' John said, ignoring the snipe about not visiting. He'd been busy for heavens sake. He had a job, he had a wife. So why did he feel so guilty?'

'Well he would, wouldn't he?' Mrs H was saying, and John wrenched himyself back to the current conversation.

'But you're not convinced?'

'Well it's not for me to say John, is it. It's a nasty business, that's all, and he's a fool if he thinks that he can just pick those things up and drop them again when he feels like it.'

A book on the shelves caught John's eye. 'That book, Mrs H. The one about drug addiction. Did you put that there?'

'No, Sherlock brought it with him when he first moved in. It was in one of those boxes of his.'

'Oh.' John frowned, wondering what to do with this information. 'What do you think I should do then?'

'Talk to him, John. He trusts you, and he cares what you think. Cares about you more than he cares about anyone, and - well, I don't know what went on between you two, but I know love when I see it. And Sherlock does love you, in his own funny way. That hasn't changed.'

'Mrs H, Sherlock and I-'

'Oh I know, you've only ever been good friends. So you keep saying dear, but be that as it may, if anyone can get him to talk about why he's using drugs again, it's you. He'll talk to you, John, I'm sure that he will.'

John packed up the items that he thought that Sherlock would need for the next few days, and left 221b in a sombre frame of mind. Drug dependency was one thing that he never thought that he'd have to deal with in such close proximity. Despite all of his years of general practice, he felt ill equipped to deal with it. But this was Sherlock. He loved Sherlock like a brother - closer than that. He remembered reading about the Greek theory of the four loves - Fratros, Eros, Philia and Agape. Philia that was easy - friendship, liking another human being, wanting to spend time in their company, now that was simple. Next came Fratros, the love between brothers, and then came Agape, the higher spiritual love, often between men. The love that drove men to die for each other; to kill for each other. John sniffed, and turned up his jacket collar against the biting wind, in an unconscious imitation of Sherlock. Love, what did he know about love? Sherlock was Sherlock and Mary was Mary, and he cared about them both in different ways, and that was all that he needed to know - wasn't it?


	12. Chapter 12

Mary got back to the house minutes after John did, plastic carrier bag full of takeaway in hand as promised.

'How's Cath?' he asked.

'Oh, you know,' she said, as she pulled plates out of the kitchen cupboard, and John started pulling the lids off the plastic containers of curry. 'She should call it a day with him really, but she's still in the pre-contemplative stage of telling him to piss off.'

'Pre-contemplative?'

'Yeah you know, like with the stages of dealing with addiction?'

John looked blank. He'd obviously 'deleted' that part of his medical education, although it looked as if it was all going to get a little more relevant now. He was starting to wish that he'd paid more attention in his psychiatry lectures.

Mary shook her head at him and sighed in mock despair. 'The pre-contemplative stage is when people are trying hard to ignore the fact that they've got a problem,' she said. 'Next comes the contemplative stage, when people acknowledge that they've got a problem, but can't work out what to do about it, then preparation, then action. Basically, Cath's got a long way to go before she sees sense and kicks the stupid bastard out on his ear.'

'And which stage do you think Sherlock's at?' John asked, slowly.

'You really think that he's got a problem? With drugs? I thought that he said that it was all for a case?'

'And you believe him?'

'I - I'm not sure. You should give him a chance to explain though John, surely, before you jump to conclusions. You know what he's like. There may be a reasonable explanation. And even if he is using, it doesn't necessarily mean that he's addicted.'

'Oh Mary,' John said, walking over to her, and wrapping her into a hug. 'I wish that I had your faith in humanity.'

'You mean that you think that I'm naive?'

'No, I mean what I say. But maybe you're right. Either way, I don't want to think about it tonight. I want to eat Indian takeaway with my beautiful wife, watch crap telly, and try very hard not to think about the mess that Sherlock Holmes has got himself into this time.'

...

Exactly how big a mess became apparent not long after John walked into Sherlock's room early the next afternoon. When he'd phoned ITU in the morning, he'd been told that they were about to transfer Sherlock onto the private ward. They'd suggested that he give them a few hours to get him settled before visiting, so he'd delayed his visit until later than normal.

Walking into Sherlock's room, John found him asleep. He put the leather holdall of clothes etc into the locker beside Sherlock's bed, and settled himself down to wait for his friend to wake up. He pulled out his copy of The Metro that he hadn't got round to reading on the tube earlier, and found himself automatically skimming the paper for cases that Sherlock might be interested in. Even now, old habits died hard.

He was aware of Sherlock's slow, even breathing as he read, then found himself listening more closely. Something was off. John knew what Sherlock looked and sounded like asleep, and what he looked and sounded like when he was unconscious, and this was somewhere between the two. His breathing was slow. Not dangerously slow, but much slower than it had been since his surgery. John's eyes flicked to the monitor. Saturations were a little low, even on the oxygen. He got up and turned up the oxygen being delivered by a couple of litres. And then he spotted the morphine pump. It was turned up to ten. He checked the concentration of the morphine on the label on the side of the syringe, swore, and reached to try to turn it down. It should have been locked by a code. It wasn't, and responded immediately to his press of the buttons, as he turned the infusion rate to zero.

'You stupid bastard,' he murmured, as he pressed the call bell for the nurse and lifted Sherlock's eyelids to check his pupils. They were tiny, pinpoint. Of course they were. The tell-tale pupils of someone who had had way too much opiate.

'He's turned up the morphine infusion,' he told the nurse. 'He's out for the count. Get the anaesthetist on for the pain team in here, will you? We might need to reverse it.'

He shook Sherlock, and then when he got no response, administered a firm rub with his fist on Sherlock's sternum; the time-honoured way of waking up a drowsy patient. This earned him a mumbled swear word, and his hand was pushed away. Not completely comatose then, good. John did a quick calculation of Glasgow Coma Score, trying to work out exactly how unconscious Sherlock was. Eyes were remaining firmly shut, earning him a score of 1; Voice - inappropriate words, or were they appropriate? He'd give him 3 for that; Movement - localises pain, 5. So his GCS was nine. Better than it could have been. But he had warned James about this, hadn't he? He'd warned him that Sherlock wouldn't be able to resist fiddling with his own morphine infusion; that he'd turn it up. Did this prove dependency, or just the endless need to solve a puzzle and prove that he was more clever than anyone else? John wasn't sure.

A very worried looking anaesthetic registrar arrived, and after a blood gas sample which proved adequate ventilation, she and John decided between them that they could safely avoid reversing the morphine. While administering naloxone to block the effects of the morphine would wake Sherlock up rapidly, it was likely to leave him in screaming agony for several hours, and morphine would then have no effect on his pain until the naloxone wore off. Worse still, if Sherlock had a true opiate dependency, then it would also precipitate withdrawal symptoms. As long as they observed him closely, it was safer to watch and wait for now, and then try to find an alternative method of giving him analgesia when he finally woke up.

James MacPherson turned up at the same time as the anesthetic consultant, who looked sheepish to say the least.

'We discussed it, John,' James told him. 'It was thought unlikely that Sherlock would be able to break the code on that particular pump in his current state. Obviously we were wrong.'

'I've known alcoholics drink the alcohol gel from the hand sanitiser dispensers,' John said, 'It's amazing the lengths that people will go to. But this is Sherlock Holmes that we're talking about. Of course he was going to crack the code. I did warn you.'

'And we've learnt out lesson,' the anesthetist said briskly. 'So what do you suggest?'

'A background infusion rate, which he can put up for a maximum of twenty minutes at a time, before it reverts to a background rate,' John said. 'Then look at how much morphine he's requiring over twenty-four hours, and adjust the hourly rate accordingly.'

'That's not dissimilar to the PCA that he disabled,' the anaesthetist pointed out.

John shook his head. 'That only gives a bolus on top of the infusion rate,' he said. 'That's why he cracked the code. He needed more than it would give him. He need control over the infusion rate to achieve the analgesia that he felt that he required.'

'He could have just - asked?' the nurse said questioningly. 'Why didn't he just ask?'

'Not his style,' John said. 'The stupid bastard always has to do everything for himself. You're going to have your work cut out for you, I'm afraid, once he wakes up.'

John sat there, reading the paper cover to cover, and drinking the tea that the nurse bought him until Sherlock finally woke up some ninety minutes later. He let out a low moan as he opened his eyes, hand going automatically to the right side of his chest.

'And that's what you get when you play silly buggers with your morphine pump,' John said, as he reached across to start the infusion again from the new pump, set according to his instructions. 'And if you do that again, Sherlock, then they'll take it away from you altogether. You know that they will.'

Sherlock shut his eyes again and lay still, waiting, John knew, for the morphine to kick in, and the pain to die down.

'Did you sort it out?' he asked, when he finally opened his eyes again.

'Did I sort what out?'

'That ridiculous PCA thing. Did you get them to change it to something more sensible?'

'Standard infusion, with a capacity for you to adjust the rate for a maximum of twenty minute at a time, and the agreement that they'll adjust the infusion rate accordingly on a daily basis, depending on how much you need.'

'Perfect - thank you.' There was an edge of smugness to Sherlock's tone.

'Thank - hang on, are you trying to tell me that you did this deliberately to get what you wanted? Sherlock you could have killed yourself - again.'

'Unlikely. I calculated the dose based on what I'd used in the past. Purity is difficult to assess when you buy it on the street of course,' he paused to yawn, 'but it sounds as if my approximation was accurate. Thank you for stopping them using the naloxone by the way.'

John glared at him, resisting the temptation to punch him.

'What?' Sherlock asked innocently.

'You are the stupidest, most inconsiderate bastard, that I ever...'

'And yet here you are,' Sherlock said calmly.

'Here I am. Again,' John said. Sherlock turned to look at him, and they both smiled. Then John sniggered and Sherlock started to laugh, then grimaced and clutched his chest again.

'Only hurts when you laugh?' John asked. 'Sorry.'

'Turn it up, will you?' Sherlock asked, and John complied.

'Sherlock - about the morphine.'

'The morphine or the heroin, John?'

'It wasn't just for a case, was it.'

'I needed Magnussen to believe that I was a drug addict.'

'And the cocaine and the ketamine? Were they part of your plan too?'

'Did Molly tell you?'

'No, we had a tox screen done after the shooting. The medical staff here needed to know.'

'The more drugs, the more convincing the -'

'Bollocks,' John cut in.

'I'm sorry?'

'You heard me. It's bollocks. You used those drugs because you wanted to.'

Sherlock yawned again and closed his eyes.

'No, you don't,' John said, reaching out to turn the morphine down again. 'You're not getting out of it that easily. This is serious, Sherlock.'

'I've just come off intensive care after major surgery, John. Do you really think this is the time to discuss this?'

'Yes, I do. Sherlock, tell me. What's going on?'

But Sherlock had closed his eyes again, and despite the lower dose of morphine was fast asleep.

John let out a groan of frustration and resisted the temptation to punch something - Sherlock probably. Pre-contemplative, was that what Mary had called it? Denial was more like it. He needed to know what Sherlock had been up to and why. He pulled Sherlock's holdall out of the bedside locker again, and extracted his phone. If he wanted to play silly buggers, then John was perfectly willing to beat him at his own game.

Sensible of him to have charged Sherlock's phone for him the night before. The battery had gone flat in the days since it had been handed to John in the Resucitation Room, together with Sherlock's other personal possessions. His clothes had gone into brown paper bags and seized by CID for forensic examination, but his wallet, phone and watch had been given to John for safe-keeping.

John flicked down Sherlock's contact list, until he found the number that he was looking for.

'Shezza?' came the voice at the other end. 'We missed you, man. Where have you been? You after some gear?'

'No,' John replied. 'I'm after some information. And I think that you, Bill Wiggins, are exactly the man to give it to me.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to know what Mary got up to when she was meant to be with Cath, then have a look at 'Conversations and Conspiracies,'. It's hopefully going to be a series of 'side conversations,' dovetailing with this story, and filling in all the parallel events that John can't be aware of at the time.


	13. Chapter 13

Sherlock had taught John a lot; more than he had realised. He had taught him how to re-construct several weeks, a month even, of a man's life. He had taught him how to talk to relevant parties to work out where he had been and when. It had taught him how to trace the journey of an addiction, and John was in absolutely no doubt of the significance of what he had discovered.

That Sherlock had been using drugs was clear. That he had been doing so in plain sight in order to ensure that Magnussen would be aware of what he was doing was also clear. John wished with all his heart that he could believe Sherlock's story that this was all for a case, but there were signs there that not even he could miss. 

Sherlock had shut himself away from everyone other than Janine for the last four weeks. He had seen her twice a week, always on the same days. Something stopped John from prying too closely into the gritty details of Janine's relationship with Sherlock. He found that he simply didn't want to know. It felt - wrong, somehow - unsettling. He told himself that it was because he was aware that the whole thing was a fake, a ruse to get into Magnussen's office, but a niggling voice at the back of his head told him that he'd been unsettled by it from the beginning, even before he'd know the truth of it.

He had simply never considered Sherlock in that light before. Irene Adler apart, he had never seen him show the slightest sign of interest in any human being in that way - male or female. Initially, he had been convinced that Sherlock was gay and simply chose not to act on it. The care he gave to his personal appearance, his particularness when it came to his suits and shirts had led him to that conclusion. But it was a uniform, he realised - more than that, it was armour. Sherlock had learnt long ago how to dress in order to achieve the result that he wanted. To be respected. To be trusted. There was almost a superstition in how he dressed, a fear that if he let his guard slip then the world would see the bubbling mass of contradictions that lay within. Like his ability to wheedle information out of people by acting a part, he dressed himself in a costume which facilitated this. His suits made him feel safe. They were his protection against the world. In the flat he would slop about in pyjama trousers and old t-shirts, often worn inside out. But outside, outside it was always the suit, and the coat, of course the coat.

Since his return, Sherlock had seemed - different. Less ethereal, more present in the real world. More mature? Perhaps, but there was something else that John had chosen to ignore. He had seemed more - sombre somehow. He still attacked cases with drive and his old single-mindedness, but the energy, the sheer joy in it, that was gone. What had happened to Sherlock in those two years away, John wondered? He had never spoken of it, had said that for everyone’s safety it should remain that way, and yet John couldn’t help but think that the events of those two years had shaped the man that now resided in 221B Baker Street. Had it shaped his drug habit also? There was a chance, wasn't there?

John Watson knew all about psychological trauma. About the events that at the time you thought you'd dealt with, but which came back to bite you weeks, months, even years later. He knew about the flash-backs and the nightmares, about the voices that you just couldn't get out of your head. He knew the haunted look in a man's eyes that came from the knowledge of shots fired and lives taken. He had seen it in Sherlock's eyes after his return.

So if you had seen horrors beyond most people's imagining. If you had been beaten and tortured (and John had seen the marks on Sherlock's back when he had walked in on him changing one day, marks that hadn't been there two years ago). If you had been through all of that, and couldn't talk about it, what then? That would change a man, wouldn't it? Make him more serious, less joyful. And if his best friend, his only friend, was inadvertently, or maybe deliberately, distancing himself from him, with a new love, with a new wife, then what other and damaging ways of dealing with their experiences might a man find?

These thoughts had taken John from the tube station to the alleyway leading up to the squat where he had found Sherlock and Isaac on that fateful morning. Bill Wiggins had hung up on him immediately when he had called him from Sherlock's phone, of course he had, and he hadn't replied to a call to John's own phone either. Spooked. Good. It was always better to have your potential informant on the back foot. Especially when you knew where to find them.

The squat looked more menacing in the gloom of dusk, although Billy Wiggins himself looked no less pathetic. John found himself wondering at Sherlock's choice of venue - it was a long way from Baker Street. Had that been deliberate? It fitted that he wouldn't necessarily want to bump into any of his own Homeless Network if he was going undercover, but then why not use them as a way in? Perhaps he had. And why pick a venue so close to where John himself lived? It seemed too much of a coincidence. Had Sherlock planted planted himself there deliberately, knowing that John was likely to pitch up to rescue Isaac sooner or later? Had he wanted John to find him? And if so why? 

John walked straight past the door to the squat, and picked a spot to wait apparently playing with his phone on the far side of the skip situated outside, partly shielded from view of the door, but still with a good eye-line to it, enabling him to watch and wait.

What he did work out fairly rapidly, was that there was some kind of secret knock to gain admission. What was this, The Secret Seven for fucks sake? Deciding there was no time like the present, he walked up to the front door, wishing he had his tyre iron with him, and knocked on the door. Bill Wiggins opened it, and when he saw John, took a step back and threw his arms up defensively. 'Don't hit me!' he said.

'I'm not going to hit you,' John's said with a sigh, walking into the hallway of the squat and shutting the door behind him. 'I just want to talk to you.'

'About what?'

'About Sherlock.'

'What about him? Haven't seen him for days. Not since that morning when you tried to break my arm,' Billy said, rubbing it, as if only just remembering that it still hurt.'

'I didn't -' John started, then realising that he was on the wrong tack if he wanted to get information out of him. 'Look, I'm sorry about that, although strictly speaking I was just disarming you. How is it? Do you want me to have a look?'

'So you can break it for real this time? Not bleeding likely,' Billy said, taking another step back and pulling his sleeves down over his hands as if that would protect him. He was younger than John had first thought. Mid to late twenties perhaps. He wondered what sort of life had brought him onto the streets. His work in general practice in this area meant that it wasn't too much of a deductive leap to imagine. It would involve violence, certainly, although whether to Billy or his mother was always more difficult to work out - both usually. Then there would have been the other abuse that would have driven him onto the street; neglect and emotional abuse at best, sexual abuse at worst, often from a family friend or one of mum's new partners. There would be alcohol or drugs involved somewhere along the line, nearly always. Other children may have been taken into care. Billy had probably been in and out of the care system himself. It was a story that John had heard all too often. The details varied - the names, the dates, the places, but the basic story; that was nearly always the same.

John was going about this wrong. He knew he was. He had been angry with Billy. For providing Sherlock with drugs, for giving him a place to inject poison into his veins, but he was coming at it from entirely the wrong direction. 

'Billy, I need you help,' he said.


	14. Chapter 14

'So you're Shezza's friend, and you want me to tell you stuff so that you can help him?' Billy Wiggins said uncertainly. He was sitting across from John in the cafe round the corner from the squat, empty plate of food pushed to one side. It had taken some persuasion on John's part to get him to accompany him there, but concern for Sherlock and the need for knowledge had done it in the end. Billy Wiggins was proving something of an enigma. He was bright, that much was obvious; he was street-smart, but he was also oddly naive, with a child-like quality that reminded John uncomfortably of Sherlock.

'That's about the long and short of it,' he said in answer to Billy's question.

'So - why don't you just ask him yourself?'

'Because he's been very badly injured, Billy,' John explained patiently, for what felt like the fifth time that evening. 'He's not really in a fit state to tell me anything.'

'You mean that he won't tell you anything. I mean he's conscious and all. He's off intensive care, you've told me that. So if he's not telling you stuff, then maybe it's because he don't want you to know.'

'What? No! He's just not up to talking much, that's all, ' John said, aware that he was being far from convincing. Christ, he wasn't even convincing himself.

Billy was sitting staring hard at at John, hands templed under his chin, obviously in full deductive mode.

'Don't do that,' John muttered, pushing one of Billy's elbows off the table to force him to move his hands. 'You look like him.'

Billy scowled as his elbow jolted off the table, but took the hint and moved his hands from their steepled position. It was an exact mirror of Sherlock's reaction when John did the same to him. He never could stand that hand-templing thing. Not when Sherlock was sitting across from him at a table, anyway. Some form of character assassination invariably followed.

'I've been learning,' Billy said, recovering his composure quickly. 'He's been learning me, no, teaching me. Hot on his grammar, isn't he?'

'Did you know who he was?' John asked, wondering exactly how deep Sherlock's connection with Billy went. Not just a doorkeeper then, unless he was a doorkeeper for Sherlock, a lookout. Now there was a possibility that he hadn't considered before. 'I mean before I came along. Did you know that he was Sherlock Holmes?'

'Did wonder,' Billy said with a shrug. 'Didn't really care to be honest. He was a good bloke - interesting, you know. Got me to do things for him, bought me meals in here. Taught me stuff. Interesting stuff.'

'What sort of things did he get you to do for him?' John asked, but Billy shook his head.

'You see, here's the thing. You say you're his mate, right, but you turn up in there, drag him out of there practically by the ear, both of you shoutin' and with fists flyin', then you take him to that lab place with that fit bird -'

'Mary?' John asked.

'That the blonde bird?' Billy asked. Then in answer to John's nod. 'Na, not her. I mean no disrespect, but she's a bit old for me. No I mean the one with the long brown hair in the lab, the pretty, feisty one that slapped Shezza. I liked her.'

'Molly,' John said. 'You mean Molly.'

'Yeah that's the one. Anyway, point is you drag Shezza there, force him to have a drugs test, tell him off like you're his dad or something, and then you try to tell me that you're his mate and I should tell you what's been going on.' He shook his head. 'I don't think so.'

'I'm trying to help him, Billy,' John said.

'Maybe he don't need your help.'

'He's using drugs, Billy.'

Billy shrugged, 'So? Maybe he wants to do drugs, maybe he needs to. What gives you the right to dictate how he lives his life?'

'Because his life has led to him lying in a hospital bed with a bullet hole in his chest!' John realised that he was shouting, and stopped abruptly, hands up. 'Sorry! Sorry!' He mumbled to the suddenly silenced cafe.

'Look Billy,' he said carefully. 'Sherlock - he isn't like other people. His decisions - they aren't always good ones. He needs people around, people to stop him doing anything stupid.'

'Oh, I see,' Billy said, leaning back and regarding John with an approximation of Sherlock's analytical stare. 'You feel guilty!' he said triumphantly. 'You feel guilty that you haven't bin watching him like you think you should. Haven't been around much have you, what with your new and shiny wedding ring and that baby that's due in what January?'

'February,' John said, 'and how the hell did you know about that?'

'I watch, don't I? And I notice things. So you feel guilty about not having seen your old mate, while you've been playing happy families in the suburbs, and now you're trying to pretend that it's all his fault, and that you can just swan in and tell him what to do with his life.'

'That has nothing to do with it,' John said, way too quickly, too defensively. 'Look I just need to know what he's been using and for how long.'

'Why?'

'I told you!' John said, exasperated, 'So that I can help him.'

'And I told you -' Billy said with emphasis, 'that maybe he don't need your help.'

John sighed and reached into his pocket for his wallet. 'Look, Billy,' he said, pulling out several notes, 'I appreciate that you feel a sense of loyalty to Sherlock. Maybe -'

'Fuck off,' Billy said, standing up with a screech of chair that made everyone look at them again. 'You think that I'd sell out a mate for a handful of cash? You don't know anything. Your type with their fancy cars, and nice houses, and expensive shoes. You think we're all scum and you can just buy us off? It don't work like that. You want to help Shezza? Then maybe you should just keep your nose out of what you don't understand.'

'Billy, wait,' John started to say, realising that he'd badly miscalculated the situation, but Billy was already walking out of the cafe, hood up, slamming the door behind him.

'Nice one, John,' John murmured to himself as he threw a handful of coins onto the table as a tip and an apology to the cafe staff, grabbed his coat from the back of the chair and hurried to the door to see if he could catch up with Billy, but he had long gone.

John ran a hand through his recently cropped hair. Looked as if Sherlock had taught Billy his disappearing trick too. So what now? He obviously wasn't going to get anywhere with Billy tonight. He should go home, to Mary, to the suburbs, to his nice comfortable house. But his conversation with Billy had made him feel uncomfortable about that. Instead he found himself heading back towards the familiarity of Baker Street, and whatever answers he could find there.


	15. Chapter 15

John stood in the middle of the living room at 221b, chewing on the side of his thumb in a nervous habit that infuriated Mary. The skin by the side of his nail was red and raw where he had peeled the layers of skin back with his teeth. It was a sign of stress, he knew, but it was less destructive than smoking, or drugs. Which brought him back to his reason for being back in the flat.

His second search of the day had so far been frustratingly unsuccessful . There was nothing in Sherlock's bedroom drawers, nothing hidden beneath the sugar in the canister in the kitchen, not even anything in the space beneath the loose floorboard in John's bedroom, where John had hidden his unlicensed Browning pistol at times. That sort of hiding place was of course far too obvious for a genius to lower himself to use. If John was going to find whatever was hidden in this flat, he needed to start thinking like Sherlock Holmes. His eyes travelled round the room, considering.

'The best place to hide something is in plain sight,' came Sherlock's voice in his memory. Bookcase? Now that really was too obvious, surely. His eyes trailed to the fireplace, and the Persian slipper hanging on the wall next to it. Sherlock's favourite hiding place for cigarettes. He wouldn't, surely? He picked it up and shook it out. Nothing. He pushed his fingers in as far as they would go, but the slipper was empty. He threw it to one side in frustration, then picked it back up and looked at it more closely. The slipper was relatively large, too large for his fingers to be capable of reaching the end. And yet they had. He pulled out his phone, and used the torch mode to illuminate the inside of the shoe. There was a material covered layer occluding the shoe five or six centimetres from the end, forming a potential space between this and the end of the toe.

Using a knife from the cutlery drawer, John prized the hidden layer free, and from underneath it pulled out a small white bag of white powder. He groaned. Stupid bastard. He hadn't wanted to be right, but here it was. The proof that he needed that this wasn't just a case after all. Sherlock had a habit, an itch that needed to be scratched, a reason to keep drugs in the flat.

He shook the bag as he took it into the kitchen. What was it, he wondered - heroin? Cocaine? Something else entirely?

He placed the bag on the wooden chopping board, and pulling a knife from the knife block, sliced into the bag. Then, reminding himself that he was no longer subject to the army's random drugs test, he dipped his little finger into the powder and touched it to his tongue. Cocaine was a local anaesthetic. It should make his tongue go numb. Heroin? He had no bloody idea what effect heroin would have in tiny doses. This substance tasted oddly sweet, but it also made his tongue go numb. Hang on - no, it fizzed. It fizzed and was sweet. It reminded him oddly of - he dipped his finger in again, a larger amount of white powder this time and touched it to his tongue, then stared at the powder in disbelief.

Sherbet.

The stupid bastard had put sherbet from a sherbet fountain in a plastic bag and hidden it in the toe of the slipper. A false trail. But why? Just to piss off Anderson or more likely Mycroft if they came looking?

But John knew Sherlock. Knew about his love of the double bluff. If he had taken the trouble to hide fake drugs, then there had to be real ones somewhere. There had to be. The false ones would be an elegant decoy away from the truth.

More determined now than ever, he rifled through the kitchen cupboards. He knew what he was looking for now. Hidden compartments, secret backs to drawers, anywhere that Sherlock could have kept a secret stash. He drew a blank. The bedrooms and the bathroom were the same, nothing even on a second sweep. Back to the living room and even the bison's head proved devoid of secrets.

'Dust, dust is eloquent,' he heard Sherlock's voice saying. His eyes skimmed the bookshelf, looking for gaps in the dust line, evidence that any of them had been moved recently, but the only gap that he could find was in front of the book on drug addiction, that he had taken down himself only that morning. He pulled it off the shelf again, surely not even Sherlock would hide drugs in a book about addiction? He knew the answer to that. But a flick through the book proved it to be exactly what it seemed.

He looked again, so many books. He grabbed a chair and climbed up to reach the top shelf. He could find no break in that dust line, no clues there. Trying to think like Sherlock, he plucked several books off the shelves and leafed through them. 'Criminal Law' proved empty, so did 'Speed, Ecstasy and Ritalin: The Science of Amphetamines', 'Learning to Fly in 21 days' and all three volumes of Hansard.

And then he saw it, tucked right into the upper right hand corner of the book shelf, with a thick layer of dust on top of it - false dust? Would Sherlock go that far? 'The Pickwick Papers', a old copy, leather bound. But Sherlock hated Dickens, he had told John that many times. So why keep the book? John pulled it off the shelf, having to reach almost to the point of over balancing to grab it, dislodging a thick layer of dust with it, that made him cough.

He leafed through from the front, then the back. Several of the pages in the middle seemed to be stuck together, or were they? A quick exploration with a kitchen knife revealed something solid in the middle of the book. John ran his finger down the spine of the book and was rewarded with a click, as the lid of the secret compartment sprang open, and revealed - two small white bags of powder and a 'One Hit' kit*, still intact and sealed in its sterile bag .

John felt sick. He sat down on the chair hard, staring at the contents of the compartment. Then he cut into one of the bags and touched the powder to his tongue for the second time that day. This time there was no sweet taste, no fizzing, just numbness. Fuck.

Snapping the lid shut again, he bundled the book into his bag, doubled back at the door to pick up the bag of supposed sherbet just in case, and headed for the lab and Molly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *'One Hit' kits (other brands also exist) are fairly widely available at needle exchange programmes. They contain a sterile metal spoon, an alcohol wipe, small sachet of citric acid, a syringe and needle, and sometimes a filter. Everything that is needed to 'cook up' heroin safely in fact, as the biggest risk comes from introducing infection with dirty kit. I hope I don't need to add that I am not for a second advocating the use of illegal substances with this chapter.
> 
> Thanks, as ever, to Sevenpercent. What would I do without you? Although I still couldn't resist using the Persian slipper, obvious as it might be, which is where Holmes stores his tobacco in the original canon, much to Watson's disgust.
> 
> The books on the shelf in 221b are all really there in the BBC series - someone much more diligent than me has produced a full list, which you can find on Tumblr under the 221b books tag. The exception is Pickwick Papers which isn't there (although Jane Eyre bizarrely is). I've borrowed that from Madness and Memory. The idea of Sherlock using the same book for his stash in both stories proved irresistible.
> 
> Thanks, as ever for reading. It was the pleas for more on here and fanfiction that made me return to this story, and I'm so glad that I did!


	16. Chapter 16

'Is he okay?' Molly asked as soon as John walked through the door of the lab. 'Only they said he was doing okay when I phoned last night. Has something happened?'

'No, he's fine - well, you know, not fine, but he's getting there slowly,' John said, watching the relief flood her face. 'That's not why I'm here. I need to talk to you about the drugs, Molly. The ones that Sherlock may or may not have been using.'

Molly misinterpreted the tension in John's face and instantly looked guilty. 'I'm sorry, John,' she said, cheeks flaming, words tripping over each other in her urge to confess. 'I didn't want to be part of it, but you know Sherlock - he said it was important.'

'Part of what?' John asked, 'Molly what are you talking about?'

'Me faking his urine toxicology results of course. Only he was so insistent, I couldn't -''

John groaned and slapped himself on the forehead. 'Of course, how could I have been so stupid. That slap, it was staged, wasn't it? Was that his idea?'

'The first one was, the others were - dramatic license.' Molly suppressed a grin as she looked down. 'Thing is, it was rather satisfying, and he couldn't exactly complain, could he?'

'So the slap was faked and the drug test?'

'Faked too,' Molly said with a quick nod. 'I swapped urine samples.'

'Billy's?' John asked, but he already knew the answer. Damn, he had been so careful; he had followed Sherlock into the Gents to ensure that there was no sleight of hand or filling the sample pot up with Lucozade involved. He'd seen enough attempts at faking drug tests during his time as an army RMO to know all the tricks there were, but the one thing that had never occurred to him was that Molly might be involved too.

'But his pupils Molly - his pupils were-'

'Constricted, yes, I know. Pilocarpine eye drops. I got them from a friend who works in the Eye Clinic. They must have made his vision a bit blurred, but as he said, it wasn't as if he had to drive or anything.'

John's brain was turning somersaults. So the drug test was faked, the characteristic constricted pupils of heroin use had been faked too. Exactly how deep was this rabbit hole going to go?

'But why, Molly. Why was it so important that I thought he was using?'

'No idea. He wouldn't tell me. But it was faked, John. It was all faked. He's okay. He's clean.'

'No, he's not,' John said, pulling the copy of The Pickwick Papers out of his bag, and triggering the lock. 'Look what I found in 221b.'

Molly frowned, and reached for a pair of gloves before picking up one of the bags and looking at it closely. 'Could be just about anything,' she said. 'I can run it through the analyser if you like - see what it turns up?'

'Please,' said John. 'All three if you can.'

'What happened to this one?' Molly asked, picking up the first bag that John had opened.

'It's sherbert,' John said. 'Well at least, it tasted like sherbert. But let's analyse it anyway.'

'Bet you a fiver that there isn't a trace of illegal substance in any of them,' Molly said smugly, as she walked over to the analyser and started to prepare the samples. 'It's all part of the plan, John. He wanted to make everyone think that he was using.'

'His toxicology from The London came back as positive, Molly,' John said, exasperated, as his mind turned somersaults trying to work out what the hell was going on.

Molly froze, pipette suspended in mid-air. 'Positive for what?' She asked, without turning round.

'Heroin, cocaine and ketamine,' John told her.

Molly fed the first sample into the analyser silently before turning round and facing John.

'He could have had a friend in the lab. It could still have been faked,' she said, and John could see her mind was going through the same processes that his was. Denial, anger, acceptance. Although she didn't seem to have got as far as acceptance yet.

'You think he planned to get shot and end up in A&E at The London?' John asked. 'No, Molly, it's real. It was a double bluff. For some reason, he didn't want you to know the truth. He's been using all right. His opiate tolerance is sky-high apart from anything else. You can't face that, tolerance only comes from one thing - from using. He's needed huge doses of opiates to keep him comfortable, because his body is so used to them. There is no other explanation.'

'No!' Molly said looking horrified.

'Have you got an adequate explanation for what I've just told you?'

'No,' she said shaking her head. 'But I trust Sherlock, and I trust this analyser,' she said patting it, and it tells me - ' she pressed the print button and triumphantly handed the piece of paper spewed off from the side of the machine to John. 'It tells me that that white powder was baking powder and a harmless local anaesthetic powder - a form of lignocaine.'

'The one I thought was sherbert?'

'No, the one in the unopened bag,' she said with a grin. 'It's fake, John. It's fake cocaine, designed to look like cocaine to the casual observer, or taster, but there's nothing illegal about it.'

The results from the other two bags were similarly innocuous. One contained sucrose, citric acid, tartaric acid, and sodium bicarbonate - sherbert in fact, as John had suspected. The other sample, the one that had made John's tongue go numb, contained exactly the same innocuous substances as the first sample.

'Told you,' Molly said smugly. 'I think you owe me a fiver.'

John shook his head, 'I don't understand,' he said. 'Why would he do that? There isn't anywhere else that he could be keeping his stash. I looked everywhere.'

'Because they're not there, John. That has to be an explanation, surely?'

'He has been using though, Molly. His drug test proved that.'

'If I was you, I'd get another sample, John. Take it yourself, bring it to me and I'll analyse it.'

'But we know he's on opiates now, and the cocaine will be long gone, ketamine too.'

'Hair test,' Molly said promptly. 'That will tell us what he's been using and for how long.'

'What is he up to Molly, has he told you?'

She shook her head, 'I only know what he told you. It's all about Magnussen. He wanted Magnussen to think that he was using. Why, I couldn't say.'

'But he came here to ask you to help?'

Molly hesitated for only a second. 'He comes here all the time, John. Brings samples to put through the analyser, uses the lab kit. Sometimes he even brings coffee.'

'Sherlock brings you coffee?'

She shrugged. 'Sometimes,' she said. 'I think he's been lonely, John. He misses you. He wouldn't thank me for saying it, but - well. There it is.'

'I feel guilty enough, Molly, without you adding to it.'

'I know, and I'm sorry. I'm just - I'm worried for him, you know? I've never seen him so driven on a case, not since Moriarty. You used to provide the brakes, stop him from doing anything too stupid, but without you about, he's lost that. I don't think that there's any limit to what he'll do this time, and we both know how far he's prepared to go when he's like that.'

John thought about Moriarty, and the roof, and the fall, and the body on the pavement and the two years of not knowing,

'What do I do, Molly?' he asked.

'Talk to him,' Molly said. 'You know Sherlock, he likes to talk. Of course you might not be able to get him to talk about what you want him to, but still. He needs to know that you care, John.'

'Saving his life wasn't enough?' John asked jokingly.

'Well we've all done that,' she said lightly. 'That's what we all do isn't it? But if he is using drugs John, if he is using again, then he's going to need all the support that he can get.'


	17. Chapter 17

'You found it then,' Sherlock said without looking up as John walked through the door of his hospital room. He was sitting up in bed, reading the newspaper; still looking pale, still with the oxygen and his morphine drip attached, but there was some of his old nonchalant arrogance back.

'The fake drugs. Yes I found them. Very inventive. Did you plant them for me?'

'No.'

'For Anderson?'

'And indirectly my brother, yes. I must say, I was a little disappointed that Anderson didn't find them. I was looking forward to Mycroft's face when he found that sherbert. I presume that was the one you found - the one in the slipper?'

'And the one in the book.'

'Pickwick Papers? Good, I'm impressed John.'

Patronising bastard, John thought.

'There were more, I presume?'

'Of course. Seven in total. Seemed a nice round number. Tell me, did you actually try the contents of the bags or leave it until you got the analysis back from Molly?'

'I tried it.'

'Foolish, John. It could have been anything. You really do need to stop watching so many bad American cop shows.'

'What the hell are you up to, Sherlock?' John shouted with more volume than he had intended, as he snatched the newspaper out of Sherlock's hands.

'Maybe I should have put some diazepam in one of those packets,' Sherlock said mildly.

'Can you be serious for just one minute?'

Sherlock reached across and turned down his morphine infusion with a sigh. 'Has it occurred to you, John, that it might be done of your business?' he asked calmly.

'You made it your business when you planted yourself in that drug den with Isaac, and when you asked me to accompany you to the place where you got shot, or are you going to pretend that was part of the plan too? You made it your business when you made me think that I was going to have to crack your chest in the back of a moving ambulance to keep you alive, you stupid, stupid, bastard!'

John was yelling now and before he knew it the security detail posted outside the door were pulling him away from the bed as the nurse came running in, looking terrified.

'It's fine, just a disagreement between friends,' Sherlock told the security men firmly, and they relaxed their hold on Johns arms, but remained in the room.

' John -' Sherlock began.

'I'm going for some air,' John said, walking out of the room before he lost it entirely. Stupid, stupid bastard. How dare he pull John into his elaborate game. How dare he pretend that John didn't care. Sherlock had been right about one thing though, parenthood was going to be a doddle after all the teenage manipulation crap that Sherlock landed on him. He couldn't help wonder if this hadn't all been part of Sherlock's plan. 'Look at me, John - I'm an addict again. Look at me, John, I'm in it up to my neck and I need you to rescue me. Look at me, John, I've been shot'. Come to think of it, that last one was going a bit far, even for Sherlock.

John felt manipulated. And he didn't like it.

He walked out of Sherlock's room and headed down the stairs back to the main entrance. Head down, he could think only about getting out. Once outside the building, he kept walking, feeling his anger gradually decrease to a more manageable level. He headed towards Vallance Gardens, a rather grand name for a patch of grass with a small childrens play area, surrounded by houses on three sides. But it was a green space, somewhere to sit and calm down, somewhere to think. There was a hut selling drinks and snacks. He badly wanted coffee, but opted for a bottle of water instead. He was jittery enough as it was, the last thing that he needed was more caffeine.

He replayed the events of the day in his head; the conversation with Billy, the search of 221b, the time he had spent with Molly in the lab, and finally the conversation with Sherlock. Two thing were clear - Sherlock had been using drugs, there was no denying that. And much as John wanted to believe his story, that it was only for the case, his knowledge of addiction told him differently, Sherlock had been an addict before, Mycroft had alluded to the fact that it had been more of a problem than Sherlock himself had led him to believe. For an addict to expose himself to a substance he had previously been addicted to, on a recurrent basis, and not become addicted again was virtually impossible. Even for Sherlock Holmes. And secondly, there was absolutely no extent that Sherlock would not go to in order to stop Magnussen. Knowing what he did of his friends nature, it seemed extremely unlikely that he would let a little thing like being shot stop him.

John sat there, drinking his water, trying to work out what to do next. He pulled out his phone and tried to call Mary, but there was no reply. Of course, she was at work, and wouldn't be able to answer her phone while she was with patients. It was at times like this that he wished that he smoked.

He was going to have to go back and try to talk to Sherlock again, there was no way out of it. He walked back slowly, trying to work out what he was going to say. How he could stay supportive and not let the frustration at his friend's stupidity take over. How he could keep his own guilt out of it. He tried Mary again, wanting her quiet wisdom, but it was still going straight to answer phone.

He walked back into Sherlock's room, still unsure of what he was going to say, to find Sherlock fast asleep, the settings on the PCA turned up again.

'You bastard,' John murmured.

'He was in a lot of pain,' the nurse said, entering the room behind him. 'Took some persuasion to get him to turn it up again, but he had a coughing fit after you left. Coughing after a thoracotomy hurts like hell.'

'I'm sure that it does,' John murmured. 'Tell him I'll come and see him again tomorrow, will you?'

'Of course.'

'And if he needs me before then -'

'I'll phone you,' the nurse said firmly.

John phoned Molly on his walk back to the tube station.

'No luck?' she asked.

'How did you guess?'

'Told you it wouldn't be easy. Did he admit anything about the drugs at all?'

'Not a thing. He just told me that it was none of my business, and managed to get me so angry in the process that security pitched up to stop me thumping him. I had to go for a walk to calm down, and by the time that I got back, he was asleep.'

'Which would have course been exactly what he wanted.'

'The thought had crossed my mind. Manipulative bastard. So what now? Any suggestions?'

'Watch and wait, I suppose. He knows that you know, and he knows that you care, that's what matters. Other than that, I'm sorry John, but I have absolutely no idea. You know Sherlock, he'll always do what he wants to do, and he'll only talk about what he wants to talk about. Even to you'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Molly's reaction to this conversation can be found in the third chapter of 'Conversations and Conspiracies' which I'll be posting shortly...


	18. Chapter 18

Sherlock was gone.

John's string of expletives had brought Mycroft's security men who had been stationed outside into the room quicker than any alarm bell could have. The dummy that John had rolled over in the bed, and the curly black wig now at a rakish angle on it's head told them everything that they needed to know.

John recognised the dummy - Henry Fishguard, the same dummy that Sherlock had used just before he'd faked his own death, the dummy that he had hanged from the ceiling of 221b to try to give John a massive clue about what he was about to do. A clue that John had missed. Was Sherlock trying to give him another clue now or was it just a convenient recycling of an old prop?

'Well, no prizes for guessing how he got out,' Lestrade said, indicating the open window, and the broken cctv camera pointing to it.

'It's on the first floor!' John protested. 'He's not Spiderman, Greg. And he's not exactly in a fit state to climb down the drainpipe. Besides isn't it a little too obvious? It's not like Sherlock to leave clues.'

'Unless he wanted to,' a little voice in the back of the head told him. 'Unless he's trying to tell you something.'

Greg stuck his head out the window, looked down, looked up, and then chuckled. 'He didn't have to be Spiderman,' he said, pointing at the window cleaning platform parked high up on the building.'There's your answer.'

John groaned. 'Well at least we know how he did it this time. Where do you reckon he's gone?'

'221B? Maybe he just got fed up with being stuck in this place?'

John shook his head. 'Too obvious. He must know that's the first place that we'd look. Besides, the last time I saw him he couldn't move in bed without morphine. How the fuck did he think that he was going to manage without that?'

Lestrade coughed awkwardly and raised an eyebrow at John.

'You think he's gone to shoot up? Don't be ridiculous Greg.'

'Did I ever tell you about the first time I met Sherlock?'

John considered, frowned and finally admitted 'No.'

'The first time that I met Sherlock Holmes he was a grubby teenager, off his head on heroin and speed and goodness knows what else. He wasn't fussy in those days. I wasn't there for him. I was after a bloke who'd stabbed his dealer, but I ended up taking Sherlock to hospital all the same.'

'Why?' John asked.

Greg chuckled. 'He told me who I was, despite the fact that I was under cover. He also told me, what I'd had for breakfast, the state of my marriage and how old the kids were. All of it. Then he passed out and damned near stopped breathing. Later he did me a deal - he told me where I could find my target in return for a chance to help out with other investigations.'

'You let him work with you in that state?'

'He was an informant, John. Nothing more. I had no idea who he was, of course. He had no identification on him, and gave a false name when he did wake up. He swore blind that he was eighteen, but I was fairly sure that he was younger.'

'Didn't you check the missing persons database?'

'Of course, but he wasn't on that, not the current one anyway. Seems he disappeared so often that Mycroft had given up reporting it every time. This time it had only been a few days, Mycroft was still hoping that he'd come back of his own accord.'

'Did Mycroft know about the drugs?'

'He suspected, yes.'

'So how long was it before you worked out who he was?'

'Six months. Six months of very interesting information and deductions. Then Sherlock simply disappeared. Turned out he'd gone up to Cambridge to do his degree. He turned up again a couple of weeks before Christmas and that was the pattern for a while. Some detective I was - never realised that his appearances and disappearances matched the University terms. Then that summer he turned up on the missing persons database - I barely recognised him from his photo, but I contacted Mycroft anyway to tell him about the drugs. He wangled me getting allocated to trying to find him.'

'And did you?'

'Half dead on a Paris side-street after he'd pissed off one drug dealer too many, yes. Thought he was going to die - but before he passed out he have us enough information to nail a major cross-channel smuggling ring. He was in hospital for weeks, and then Mycroft whipped him off to a rehab place. He was in pretty deep by then. Didn't see him again for a couple of years, but after he'd finished his degree he turned up in my office cool as cucumber asking for a job. Didn't recognise him to start with in his snappy suit, nothing like the scruffy street urchin I'd known. Told him to go off and get himself some useful skills- like forensics. Even put him in touch with the bloke from our lab. Told him I didn't want him back on the street and in temptation's way.'

'And he ignored you?'

'Of course. He kept turning up at crime scenes like a bad smell, but he was keeping himself straight, and he started to become useful. It made more sense to make use of him than to keep trying to keep him away.'

'So you think...'

'That he's using again? Yeah, I'm sorry to say that I do. It fits the pattern, John. It's not the first time that he's slipped and it won't be the last. Why do you think he reacted so badly when I turned up to search his flat during that taxi driver case?'

It all seemed too convenient somehow, but John didn't have a lot else to go on. Trying to think like Sherlock Holmes scrambled his brain at the best of times. All he cared about for now was finding Sherlock and making sure that he was safe.

'Magnussen?' he asked reluctantly.

Lestrade shook his head. 'Too obvious,' he said. 'Even Sherlock wouldn't be that stupid.'

'So where would he go?'

'I've got a few ideas. Let me make a few phone-calls, call in some back-up to help us search the obvious places. Meanwhile why don't you go and talk to Molly, see if she knows where he goes when he wants to disappear?'


	19. Chapter 19

221b had seemed too obvious a place to look, but John had started there all the same. Predictably there was no sign of Sherlock. but John had found himself peering into the wardrobes and under the beds, climbing the rickety ladder that led up to the attic storage space and even asking Mrs Hudson to open up 221C, just in case.

Greg, meanwhile, still convinced that Sherlock had gone to find drugs, had called in reinforcements to do a tour of Sherlock's known bolt-holes and local squats, starting with the one that John had found Sherlock on that fateful morning, but of Sherlock Holmes there was no sign, and even Bill Wiggins seemed to have disappeared. John couldn't help but wonder if Bill hadn't been involved in Sherlocks escape - he would have needed an accomplice after all.

The list of bolt-holes given to Greg by Mycroft had yielded no evidence of Sherlock either, and Molly's flat, when John had sent her home to look for him there, had also proved empty.

Because Sherlock wasn't hiding, John had suspected that from the beginning. He had left the hospital for a reason, and John was fairly sure that he knew what that reason was. He didn't buy Greg's explanation of him leaving to score drugs. That awkward, addicted teenager that Greg remembered had been a lifetime ago. Sherlock had been hooked up to a morphine infusion in hospital, he'd had the drugs on tap, and as he hadn't shown any signs of withdrawal from cocaine or ketamine, it seemed unlikely that he would have left hospital to seek those. Besides, if Sherlock could manage to break out of hospital without being detected, then having drugs brought into him wouldn't have been an issue.

There was only one thing that would have made Sherlock leave his hospital bed - a case; a mystery; the need to find answers, and to solve a puzzle, John knew him well enough for that. He'd gone after the shooter, John was sure of it. But why?

Even Mary had drawn a blank on that one, although she had volunteered to go and talk to a few people for him - Stanford, Andersen, Angelo, anyone who Sherlock might have talked to, who might know where he could have gone. Looking for Sherlock in London was like trying to find a needle in a haystack - worse, it was like trying to find a needle who knew every inch of that haystack, who knew how to disappear into it, like a ghost.

In desperation, John had found himself walking the streets, going to familiar places, trying to think like Sherlock, to find anyone who might know where he had gone. Sherlock had always seemed able to find one of his Homeless Network without any perceptible effort. It took John a good half an hour to finally find someone that he recognised, a girl who claimed to be nineteen but who John had always suspected was much younger, settling down for the night by the skatepark on the Southbank that had just been saved from redevelopment. He had asked her if she had seen Sherlock, trying to slip her a twenty pound note, in a poor imitation of Sherlock's nonchalant style, but she had just shaken her head, and pushed the money away.

'Look he's hurt, I need to find him.'

She shrugged. 'Sometimes people need to disappear,' she said. 'And it's not up to us to grass them up.'

'So you do know where he is?'

'No, I told you. Haven't seen him.'

'Could you ask about a bit, maybe? I'll reward anyone who can tell me where he is.'

She shook her head again. 'You're not listening to me,' she said. 'Nobody's seen him. Nobody is going to have seen him until he wants to be found. Until then I'd leave him be.'

It had reminded John uncomfortably of his conversation with Bill Wiggins a few days previously, but something jarred. 'Until he wants to be found.' What if he did want to be found? What if he was leaving John clues, starting with the dummy in the hospital bed. What if this was a treasure hunt after all?

He had phoned Greg, who was running out of ideas as fast as he was, and suggested that they re-convene at 221b. If they wanted to find Sherlock Holmes, then they were going to have to think like Sherlock Holmes.

...

'He knew who shot him,' John said, pacing the room in an unconscious imitation of Sherlock. 'The bullet wound was here,' he tapped the front of his chest. 'So he was facing whoever it was.'

'So why not tell us?' Lestrade asked. 'Because he's tracking them down himself?'

John's original theory, but it seemed too simple somehow. Why would Sherlock be after the shooter? Not for revenge, it wasn't his style. Sherlock never wanted revenge, he wanted answers, and if he had answers then he would have told them what they were - he never could resist showing off. No, if he was going after the shooter then there was only one possible explanation for that.

'Or protecting them,' he said slowly. What was it Sherlock said? 'When you have ruled out the impossible then what remains, however improbable, must be the truth'. Sherlock hadn't told them who the shooter was because he knew them. Because he was protecting them. However improbable that might be, it was the only possible explanation.

'Protecting the shooter? Why?' Lestrade asked, echoing John's own thought procesess.

'Well, protecting someone, then,' John said, thinking out loud now. 'But why would he care? He's Sherlock. Who would he bother protecting?'

He sat down in the chair without thinking, thinking how friendly it felt, how familiar, then looked down at it.

His chair, back in it's original place. The chair that Sherlock had moved out because it had allegedly blocked his view of the kitchen. The chair that he had moved when he had replaced John with Janine, or maybe with Bill Wiggins. The chair that he had moved to prove to John that he had moved on. Back where it had always been - opposite Sherlock's chair, ready for late night conversations. Ready for him to sit back down in it and - what? Another clue? It had to be.

'Call me if you hear anything. Don't hold out on me, John,' Lestrade was saying, but John barely heard him, still trying to work out the mystery of the chair. When had Sherlock moved it back in? It hadnt been there when he'd come to search 221b for drugs, he was sure of it. Had it been there earlier that evening? He was frustrated to realise that he couldn't remember.

'Call me, okay?' Lestrade was saying.

'Yeah. Yeah, right,' John replied, trying to work out what it meant. The chair, the dummy, the search for the shooter. Clues, so many clues. The answers had to be there somewhere. In this room, in this flat. He stroked the arms of the chair, trying to find answers in the fabric, in the familiarity. He knew Sherlock, even after all those years that he was away. Knew him better than anyone, better even than his own family. That was what Sherlock was relying on, he was sure of it. He was relying on him to work it out.

Distantly he was aware of Mrs Hudson saying goodbye to Lestrade, he was impatient for him to leave, because he had worked out something else. Sherlock didn't want Greg to know. The clues had been planted for John, only for John. 'Who would he bother protecting?' John had never so desperately wanted to be wrong over the answer that he couldn't help but form to that question.

'John? Need a cuppa?' Mrs Hudson was asking. A nice cup of tea - her solution to everything. It reminded him of his first visit to 221b, of the cabbie, of Sherlock's disappearance to find him, of him banking then on John picking up the clues, that he would find him in time to save him.

If Sherlock was relying on him to find him again then he might be about to be severely disappointed. And yet there was this undeniable clue. The chair. The clue was the chair. But what was Sherlock trying to tell him this time?

'Mrs Hudson?' he said, half turning towards her, wondering if she would work better or worse than the skull that Sherlock had used to favour talking to in John's absence. 'Why does Sherlock think that I'll be moving back in here?' Because that was what it meant, wasn't it? The chair, his chair, back in its place. That was exactly what it meant.

'Oh, yes, he's put your chair back again, hasn't he? That's nice! Looks much better.'

Look - of course, that was it. Sherlock knew that he would come in here when he failed to find him, knew that he would sit down in his chair, knew that he would look - first towards the kitchen where Mrs H would of course be making the ubiquitous cup of tea, and thenvthat he would turn his gaze the other way. To the side table on his right, and on that was, was...

John felt sick. Transfixed by the object on it. Unable to look away. Unwilling to believe what Sherlock was trying to tell him.

The perfume bottle. Mary's perfume bottle. The duty-free bottle that she had got when they were returning from their honeymoon in Barabados. He recognised it from the slight chip in the bottom right hand corner where she had dropped it on the tiles of the bathroom floor when she was unpacking.

Mary's perfume.

The perfume that Sherlock had detected in Magnussen's office.

The perfume that had belonged to the shooter.

Memories flooded into his head, one after another,. Mary looking tired and drawn the morning after the shooting, vomiting when he told her of the extent of Sherlock's injuries.

Mary refusing to go to see Sherlock with him after that initial visit.

Sherlock saying Mary's name as he woke up from his sedation.

Sherlock refusing to tell anyone who had shot him.

His own voice again, asking Lestrade who Sherlock would want to protect.

Mrs Hudson was talking, but he couldn't hear her, the words made no sense. He felt oddly distant and light-headed. He forced himself to look away from the bottle towards the window for a moment, to take a few deep breaths, to try to still the ringing in his ears. And then he realised that the ringing was real that it was coming from the room, from his phone.

And then Mrs Hudson was holding his phone out towards him, and he was taking it and blindly stabbing at the screen to pick up the call, unable to speak, unable to acknowledge the voice on the other end.

'I'm sorry, John,' the voice said. And then he knew that it was true.


	20. Chapter 20

  
John sat with his forehead resting against the window of the cab, appreciating its coolness, needing the physical sensation of it to anchor him to reality in a world that suddenly seemed to be imploding.

He had never in his life wanted Sherlock to be wrong more.

Because Sherlock was wrong - he was often wrong. In fact, when John really thought about it, he got it wrong more often than he got it right.

But he always got it right in the end - always. And this, John had an uncanny feeling, _was_ the end.

He had no idea where he was going. Sherlock had told him only that there was a black cab waiting for him outside, and he had numbly walked down the stairs of 221b and got into the back of it. The cab driver had proved strangely unchatty for a cabby - confirming that he was here for John, but refusing to divulge their destination. And John had been too tied up with his own thoughts to notice the dark streets that they were driving through.

He sat up and forced himself to concentrate. They were on the Westway. On his left he could vaguely see the tower blocks of St Mary's Hospital and beyond it, the dark shape of Paddington Station. Then the cab turned left, towards Bayswater. John sat back, wondering where on earth Sherlock was taking him.

'Do you trust me, John?' he had asked.

'Sherlock, where are you?'

'There's a cab waiting outside. Get in, don't ask any questions. It will bring you to where I am.'

'Mary -'

'It isn't what you think.'

'Then what is it?' he had hissed, very aware of Mrs Hudson standing in the kitchen behind him, pretending to be invisible but listening hard all the same. 'Explain this to me Sherlock.'

'Not now. Get in the cab, John and you'll hear everything that you need to know.'

John had gone through every possible permutation in his head, but one fact remained. His wife, his beautiful wife, his beautiful intelligent, wife had shot his best friend and then disappeared, like a shadow.

' _Like an assassin_ ' whispered the voice in his head. Because not only had his wife shot his best friend, she had been in Magnussen's office. She had broken into Magnussen's office - one of the most secure locations in the country. She had knocked out a security guard, knocked out Janine, and turned a gun on Charles Augustus Magnussen. Why for heavens sake? Why on earth would she do that? Who was she? What was she? And why the hell hadn't he realised before that there was something odd about this beautiful, intelligent woman choosing him, John Watson. Had she just married him to get to Sherlock? And if so then why hadn't Sherlock worked it out? Sherlock liked her, for heavens sake. Had she fooled him too?

Buried in his thoughts, John hadn't even noticed that the cab was slowing down until it drew to a halt outside a row of white-fronted buildings and the interior light came on, bringing John back to reality with a jolt.

'Eighteen quid please, mate.' The cabby was saying. Of course, Sherlock might have organised the cab but heaven forbid that he would actually have paid for it.

John scrabbled for his wallet and pulled out a twenty pound note. Handed it to the cabby. 'Keep the change,' he murmured out of habit, opening the door to the cab and clambering out before turning back to the cabby uncertainly.

'Um - where am I going?'

'No idea mate, sorry, I was just told to bring you here. Middle of Leinster Gardens, he said. Strange place, isn't it? Spooky almost. And noisy too, what with those trains going through the back of the buildings.'

'Thank you,' John murmured, and the cab sped off as soon as he had shut the door.

He stood for a moment, facing the row of houses, wondering where he should go. He jumped at the buzzing of his phone in his pocket.'Straight ahead,' came Sherlock's voice. 'Number 24.'

The door opened as John reached it, but instead of a house, John found himself having to turn a sharp left into a narrow corridor.

'What is this place?'

'No time. I'll explain later. I need you to sit in the wheelchair.'

'What? Sherlock what the hell is going on - and you look like shit by the way. You're the one who should be sitting down. I'm amazed you can even stay vertical.'

'John, I need you to trust me.'

'I do trust you. I just want to know -'

'And I've told you there is no time. Our assassin will be here in less than five minutes if all goes to plan. I need you to sit in that wheelchair, stay still and silent no matter what happens, and pretend to be me.'

'You want me to sit in a wheelchair and pretend to be you while the person who tried to assassinate you comes in and has a second pop? Do you think I'm crazy?'

'John,' Sherlocks voice was low and urgent now as he seized him by the shoulders. 'There's no time to explain. Just do as I ask. I promise you that you will be safe.'

And John, feeling more detached from an increasingly surreal situation by the minute did as Sherlock asked. He sat himself in the wheelchair, allowed Sherlock to stick the blind ending drip tube to his arm, turned up his coat collar and ruffled his hair as Sherlock's instructed in a poor approximation of Sherlocks curls.

'Put this in your ear,' Sherlock said, handing him a tiny earpiece. 'You will be able to hear our conversation but we won't be able to hear you. I'll be just outside, out of sight. And whatever happens, remember, don't move and don't speak. It's essential that our visitor doesn't realise who you are.'

'What if it goes wrong?' John asked.

'It won't.'

'But what if it does?'

There was a soft buzz in Sherlock's pocket. 'No time, John,' he said, already striding towards the door. 'It's showtime.'

It was only seconds after Sherlock had walked out of the door that John heard a soft click in his earpiece indicating that a call was in progress.

And then he heard Mary's voice, and his heart started racing so fast that he thought it might explode.

 _'Let him be wrong. Please God, let him be wrong,_ ' he found himself praying, to a God that he had long ago decided almost certainly didn't exist,

'Where are you?' Mary was asking.

'Can't you see me?' Sherlock replied.

'Well, what am I looking for?'

'The lie, the lie of Leinster Gardens – hidden in plain sight. Hardly anyone notices. People live here for years and never see it, but if you are what I think you are, it'll take you less than a minute.

The houses, Mary. Look at the houses.'

What was he doing? She wouldn't see it - why would she see it? John had walked down that road maybe half a dozen times before, when he was doing home visits in the area. He had never spotted it - the missing houses. Why would Mary, his Mary, a simple practice nurse recognise it for what it was? Why would Sherlock think that she would? And _clever?_ he was calling her clever. He rarely called anyone that - certainly not John. Clever was what he admired most in the world. His greatest compliment - why would he pay such a compliment to the person that he thought had shot him?

And then in Mary's voice, an unconscious reflection of Sherlock's own expression when he had worked out something that was - clever.

'Ohhhhh!'

That quickly? She had worked it out that quickly?

'Thirty seconds.' Sherlock sounded impressed too. And John found himself oddly proud of his brilliant wife. How had he not realised? How had he not known that she was that quick, that sharp.

 _'Because she hid it from you,'_ came the voice inside his head. _'Because she was concealing from you what she really was.'_ Cold spread from the base of his neck down his back, his ears ringing so loudly that he could no longer hear the conversation between Sherlock and Mary. His legs felt odd, heavy and lead like and the room in front of him started to swim and fade at the edges even in the dull half-light afforded by the single safety light behind his head.

He was going to pass out and blow all of Sherlock's plans.

Forcing himself to focus, he put his head down on his knees for a moment, concentrating on his breathing, ignoring the conversation going on between Sherlock and Mary. Breathe all the way out, deep breath in, hold it for four, breathe all the way out and repeat. He was hyperventilating, that was all. If he could control his breathing, he could focus, he could stay alert. Sherlock was wrong, of course he was wrong. Mary might not be who he thought she was, but she was still Mary. And he knew her, and loved her and she was intrinsically good. Wasn't she?

The click of the door made him jump and then a figure entered - silhouetted against the light of the street, their face in shadow, but he would have recognised her anywhere.

And she was standing there, staring at him as he sat there. And as much as he wanted to shout and scream at her, to ask her what the hell she was doing, he knew he had to keep his promise to Sherlock. He remained there, motionless, watching his wife who until an hour ago had been one of the two people that he cared for most in the world. And he could say nothing to her at all.

'What do you want, Sherlock?'

'Mary Morstan was stillborn in October 1972. Her gravestone is in Chiswick Cemetery where – five years ago – you acquired her name and date of birth and thereafter her identity,'

Sherlock was saying over the phone, still hidden from view as Mary started to walk slowly down the corridor towards John, believing that the person who was talking was him.

'That's why you don't have friends from before that date.'

Oh God, the wedding, of course. Why hadn't he seen it? No school friends, no cousins, nothing. Who had nobody but a handful of friends and an annoying ex-boyfriend? Somebody who had invented their entire past, that was who.

'You must have an annoying great-aunt or two we need to invite?' he had teased her, but she had just laughed and told him that her family didn't have a good record for living past sixty. Both of her parents had been only children, she had explained, and she had spun the lie so convincingly that he hadn't doubted her explanation for a second. After the car crash that had claimed both of their lives while Mary was in her early twenties, she'd found herself literally alone in the world. Her inheritance was how she had been able to afford the flat, the one that they still lived in. Their home, the one that they were planning to bring their baby home to in a few months time. Oh Christ, the baby. What if she was lying about that too?'

He forced himself to focus. Mary was still walking towards him, still believing he was Sherlock.

'It's an old enough technique, known to the kinds of people who can recognise a skip-code on sight,' Sherlock was saying.

My God, what was she? A spy? Some kind of sleeper sent by Moriarty to reach Sherlock even from before the grave? What was she? This woman who he had taken to his heart and his bed, who had brought him back to life after Sherlock left him empty and broken.

'..have extraordinarily retentive memories ...' Sherlock was saying, and John remembered how Mary could remember the tiniest of details - addresses and entire medical histories of patients, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, every tiny detail of a menu or a holiday. She never got lost, as if she had the entire map of London and every major city stored inside her head. How had he not realised?

 _'You see what you expect to see, John,'_ came Sherlock's voice in his head. And so he had.

Mary has stopped now, staring at the man she believed to be Sherlock from halfway down the corridor.

'You were very slow,' she said.

'How good a shot are you?' Sherlock asked conversationally and John had to exercise all of his self-restraint to not duck down behind the chair as his wife, his beautiful wife, pulled a gun from the inside of her coat and he heard the unmistakeable click of the safety catch being taken off. She might struggle to shoot John in cold blood, but she thought that he was Sherlock, and she had already tried to shoot Sherlock once.

' _Trust me, John,'_ came Sherlock's whispered voice in his head. And he did. Against all logic or reason or did, because he knew that however clever Mary, or whoever this woman he was married to might be, Sherlock was cleverer. And he had been here before. He had set a scene, in an abandoned place, with an assassin, and a gun, and he had triumphed before. And he would do so again. Because he was Sherlock Holmes, and Sherlock Holmes always solved the case.

'How badly do you want to find out?'

'If I die here, my body will be found in a building with your face projected on the front of it. Even Scotland Yard could get somewhere with that.'

Of course, a safety net. One that not even Mary could ignore.

She nodded in the gloom of the hallway, but the gun remained by her side. John wondered how quick her reflexes were - if he could shout out in time to alert her to his real identity before she pulled the trigger. Somehow he didn't want to find out.

'I want to know how good you are,' Sherlock was saying. 'Go on. Show me. The doctor's wife must be a little bit bored by now.'

And Mary, his Mary, his wife, reached into her bag, took out a coin, flicked it in the air, and in a feat that the most crack shock in his old artillery regiment would have been proud of, hit it apparently without effort.

My God, who was this woman? And would he be her next target when she realised that he wasn't Sherlock? Sherlock seemed to think that she would care about being unmasked but if she was what he thought she was, if Sherlock had been her target after all, would she just kill them both and disappear?

And then Sherlock was there, silhouetted against the doorway, and John felt relief flooding through him.

'May I see?' Sherlock asked, and he saw the hint of amusement on Mary's face as she realised that she had been tricked How Sherlock must be loving the reveal, his moment of drama. And John almost hated him for that for a moment, for taking pleasure in John's misery.

Mary glanced towards John, and then shook her head, turning to Sherlock with a low laugh.

'It's a dummy,' she said.

'Yes it is,' John thought, 'but not in the way that you think.'

'I suppose it was a fairly obvious trick.'

She walked towards Sherlock and kicked the coin towards him. Sherlock picked it up and examined it.

'And yet, over a distance of six feet, you failed to make a kill shot,' he said, holding the coin up to ensure that John too could see the hole shot straight through the middle of it from over Mary's shoulder.

'Enough to hospitalise me; not enough to kill me,' he continued. 'That wasn't a miss. That was surgery.'

And John realised with a jolt that he was right, that this was what he had wanted to witness for himself, because he wouldn't have believed it any other way. Mary was a crack shot, that much was obvious. If she had wanted to kill Sherlock, then she would have done so. A shot to the head, or even one to the heart would have been easy. She could have killed John too just as easily if that had been her aim.

She hadn't missed. She had shot to incapacitate Sherlock, to give herself time to escape. And yet she had still stayed. Knowing that he had known who she was, what she was. She had still stayed. Why? And over Mary's head, Sherlock gave him the slightest of nods, as if to say ' _You know why, John. She stayed for you_.'

'I'll take the case,' Sherlock was saying.

'What case?'

'Yours. Why didn't you come to me in the first place? '

'Because John can't ever know that I lied to him. It would break him and I would lose him forever' Thank God, he was right, he was right . It wasn't all lies. She did - did she? Still love him? Was that much at least true?

'And, Sherlock, I will never let that happen.

And then Sherlock was turning as if to walk away from Mary altogether.

'Please understand,' she was saying. 'There is nothing in this world that I would not do to stop that happening.' And for one horrible moment, John thought that she was going to shoot Sherlock after all, and then Sherlock's hand was on the fuse box.

'Sorry, not that obvious a trick,' he said, as the lights came blazing on, and John knew that the time for secrecy was over.

He stood up, wondering what on earth he was going to say to her, as Mary turned to look at him and he saw the realisation in her face. That he knew, that he knew everything. But beyond that he saw something else - not anger, as he might have expected, but fear. Fear of loss, fear of losing him. And he knew that whatever lies she had told, there was one basic truth. She loved him, she was his wife and she loved him and wanted to hold onto him.

But how he felt about her in that moment was almost impossible to determine.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to know what happened to Sherlock between leaving hospital and arriving at Leinster Gardens, and specifically how he is still standing and functioning then have a look at Studies in Serotonin, which explores his rationale for the drugs and more.
> 
> This chapter comes with thanks to sevenpercent, ThessalyMc and GhyllWyn for the amazing inspiration (and help on plot-holes!) that I have received. You're all fantastic, and you got me writing again. If you haven't read their works then you're missing a treat. And with thanks also to ArianeDeVere for the transcript of HLV.


	21. Chapter 21

'Now talk and sort it out. Do it quickly.'

Sherlock made it sound so easy. John stared at Mary, wanting to say so many things to her, but somehow, the thoughts just refused to form themselves into words What he felt was too complex, too intense to verbalise. He wanted more than anything to just walk out of that door and never see her again. But there was a baby involved - his baby. His child was being carried by the woman who had lied to him, time and again about who and what she was. And worse, it was being carried by the woman who had tried to shoot Sherlock and had then sat by his side at Sherlock's hospital bed in intensive care, never once showing anything other than compassion and concern. How could she have lied to him so convincingly? And, more to the point, how could he have allowed himself to be deceived so completely?

And so John stared at Mary, and Mary stared at John and neither of them spoke. In the end it was Sherlock who broke the silence. 'Baker Street,' he said. 'Now.'

There was a cab waiting outside, of course there was. The same black cab that had brought John to Leinster Gardens in the first place.

'I'll walk,' he said, turning away. No way in hell was he going to sit pleasantly beside Mary for the journey back to Baker Street as if nothing had happened. And the cab, like most London black cabs, had only an empty space for luggage beside the driver where the front passenger seat should be, so not even that option was available to him.

'John -' came Sherlock's voice as John started to head for the main road, and he hoped another cab. For all his bravado it was a long walk back to Baker Street. He kept walking, not realising that Sherlock had caught him up and was walking beside him until he felt a hand on his arm.

'John, you promised that you would trust me.'

'I can't, Sherlock. I can't sit in a cab beside her without - without,' he shook his head and looked at the ground, hands formed into fists. _Without what? Without thumping his pregnant wife? Would he? Could he? Was that what he was really afraid of?_

'Then don't sit beside her,' Sherlock answered. And then when John failed to move, squeezed his arm for added emphasis. 'John, please. This is important. We don't have much time.'

John shook his head. 'Of all the things that you've asked me to do for you..'

'I know. Now do this.'

John sighed, and pulling his arm away from Sherlock's grip, walked back towards the cab, heading for the kerb-side door, ignoring Mary, illuminated by the interior light of the cab, watching him as he approached. He wrenched open the door, and ignoring the empty seat beside his wife, instead sat down on the jump seat, leaving Sherlock to slide into the seat next to Mary.

He kept his gaze focused out of the window, avoiding looking at the others. He would travel back to Baker Street with them if he must, but he was damned if he was going to have this conversation in a cab. They travelled in silence, the only noise the hum of the diesel engine, and concerningly, Sherlock's rapid breathing, the events of the evenings obviously taking their toll. But when John looked up to check on him, Sherlock just shook his head at him in his old code on a case for ' _Leave it_ ,' and John resumed his focus on the world outside his window, forcing his anger down to a controllable level.

There was a technique that he'd learnt from Ella during his months of therapy, when he had freshly returned from Afghanistan and anger and grief had threatened to consume him. It was a technique of dissociation, of forcing himself to watch his thoughts from a distance rather than trying to suppress them, while remaining emotionally disconnected. A way of allowing all the thoughts racing through his head to go where they would, rather than suppressing them until they erupted into violence.

He had got into a few fights those first few weeks after he had been released from hospital, before he had met Sherlock, while he was still trying to work out what the hell he was going to do with his life. He wasn't proud of it, but Jesus it had felt good at the time. Wiping the smug smiles off the faces of the little pricks who had thought that a short bloke with a crutch out on his own was an easy target for their knew he was in trouble when he started walking the street so at night looking for groups of teenagers and smug twenty-somethings that he could teach a lesson to. Like some strange crutch-carrying vigilante. That was when he'd dug out the card that had been given by the psychologists at Headley Court, at the end of his stay on the military rehab unit there, and had finally phoned Ella for an appointment.

_'You need to learn to disconnect from events around you when you're struggling to cope with your emotions_ ,' she had said to him. ' _Take a physical and a mental step back from the situation, and then just allow your mind to wander wherever it wants. Don't try to analyse anything, don't try to direct where they are going, just sit back and watch and try to remain as detached as possible, try to avoid putting any kind of emotional significance onto them. Just - watch. The problems come when you try to suppress things, This is a way of enabling your mind to defragment itself if you like. Eventually your thoughts will start to arrange themselves into rational cognitive sets, and that is something we can work on here too_.'

And so they had, and over time the anger and the despair had hit him less often, but even now at times of stress, John found himself reverting to the technique. Disconnecting to remain in control. An odd theory, but an effective one.

Once the initial anger had faded, he found it oddly soothing, just allowing thoughts and memories to flood through his mind. It was a little like meditation without the need to clear your mind or push thoughts away. John had always been dreadful at meditation - his mind was too busy a place. He had gone out with a girl who was a yoga-nut for a while, when he was a house officer, fresh out of medical school. She had dragged him to yoga classes with her where he was nearly always the token man, but while the exercise part of it and the breathing he had found calming, it was the relaxation part that he had been unable to cope with.

Even with every cognitive trick that he had learnt fully deployed, they arrived at Baker Street long before John was ready to face what must come next. He got out of the cab first, and threw a twenty pound note at the cabby without even waiting to hear the fare, then opened the door with his key and set off up the stairs. Behind him he was vaguely aware of the softer steps of Mary, and behind her, he knew, was Sherlock. He could hear his breathing as he started up the stairs. It sounded laboured - Christ, Sherlock. How the hell was he was coping physically with all of this? He'd just come out of intensive care, for heaven's sake. He'd had his chest cracked open and was recovering from open heart surgery. But John found himself pushing his medical concern to the side as soon as he walked through the door to 221B.

Sherlock had planned this. He knew what he was doing and he was doing it for a reason. There was a plan, there was always a plan, and at the moment, John trusted Sherlock a hell of a lot more than he trusted his wife.

He pulled off his coat and dropped it wearily in the kitchen, somehow unsurprised when Mrs Hudson came out of the kitchen as if he had only left her there just minutes before.

'John!' she said, but somehow he could not bring himself to acknowledge her. Then Mary came into the room and lastly Sherlock, obviously struggling even with the effort of the stairs, pulling himself up on the bannister.

'Oh Sherlock! Oh good gracious you look terrible!' she exclaimed as he came in. And so he did, waxy pale, and panting still with the effort of the stairs.

'Get me some morphine from your kitchen, I've run out,' he said and John felt a jolt of pity for him. Sherlock had been on a PCA. The PCA had been disconnected when he'd left the hospital, the one at Leinster Gardens only a dummy. He must be in agony. But why he thought Mrs Hudson would have morphine in her kitchen he had no idea. Some tramadol, some diazepam perhaps, but morphine? He'd heard her complain about her hip pain and her inadequate GP many times and morphine derivatives had never been mentioned.

'I don't have any morphine,' she told Sherlock and John feel a flash of relief, Their Landlady hiding Sherlock's stash for him was something not even Mycroft had ever considered and would have been a step too far, even for John.

'What is going on?' she asked, looking round at them all. Sherlock pale as a ghost, supporting himself against the wall, Mary looking as if - well as if her husband had just found out that every word that she'd said to him about her past was a lie and that her secret identity as a paid killer had just been revealed to him. And John himself? He could only imagine how he must look. Like a man whose world had suddenly imploded. That was how he felt.

'Bloody good question,' he replied, realising he had absolutely no idea why they were there. Sherlock had done the big reveal, he'd proved how clever he was, he'd gained a confession from Mary and also something approximating an explanation for landing Sherlock in hospital but not in Molly's mortuary. He had proved to John that whatever lies Mary had told, that her love for John was not one of them. But then why here? Why now? Why not allow John to take him back to hospital to get the treatment that he needed and more to the point the morphine?

'Trust me,' he had said to John, and John did. He would trust Sherlock with his last breath, and if Sherlock had brought them here then it must be for a reason. But whatever reason he was expecting, it was certainly not the one that came out of Sherlock's mouth next.

'The Watsons are about to have a domestic, and fairly quickly, I hope, because we've got work to do.'

_A domestic_? What did Sherlock think this was? Some sort of twisted version of Relate? And suddenly John had had enough - enough of this situation, enough of being stuck in a room with his lying wife and enough of Sherlock Holmes trying to run his life for him. If he thought that he was going to just kiss and make up with Mary so that they could get on with the bloody case then he had another thought coming. Did he think that John was just going to forgive her? He was torn for a moment between shouting at Sherlock, and shouting at Mary. But in the end, it was his anger for her that won out. He checked himself for just a second, making sure that he could keep himself under some kind of control before he walked up to her.

'I have a better question,' he said. 'Is everyone I've ever met a psychopath?'

It was Sherlock who replied. 'Yes,' he said quietly and Mary just gave a tiny nod of agreement and they were back to silently staring at each other.

'Good that we've settled that,' Sherlock said hurriedly, yet again breaking the uncomfortable silence. 'Anyway, we...'

And then John finally lost it. 'SHUT UP!' he yelled - at Sherlock, at Mary, at the whole bloody universe. 'And stay shut up, because this is not funny. Not this time.'

Sherlock's quiet reply was lost on him as he turned back to Mary, and suddenly he knew exactly what he needed to say to her. It was a litlle like the cognitive trick that he'd learnt from Ella, really. You just spoke without allowing the words to be filtered. He had no desire to protect her, no desire to protect himself, not anymore. He just wanted to get this over with. And he wanted to let her know, so there could be no possible doubt, exactly what she had done to him. This woman who had come into his life when he had been left broken and empty by Sherlock's presumed death, and had given his future back to him. This woman who had let him believe that he could have a normal life: a home that didn't have a chemistry lab in the kitchen and eyeballs in the fridge; a normal job that okay involved putting your fingers up people's bottoms on a regular basis, but at least didn't involve being shot at or blown up by psychopaths, unless he chose to do that in his spare time; a wife, and soon a child. She had let him glimpse a happy ever after future and then stolen it away from him. And he was absolutely furious about it.

'You,' he said. 'What have I ever done - hmmm? My whole life - to deserve you.'

Mary remained silent, and again it was Sherlock who answered for her. 'Everything,' he said.

'Sherlock, I've told you,' John said in exasperation, 'Shut up.'

But Sherlock obviously wasn't going to shut up, and Mary wasn't going to be the one to interrupt him. 'Oh, I mean it, seriously. Everything – everything you've ever done is what you did.'

John stared at his friend, trying to make sense of his words. So this was all his fault? And then he recognised that look in Sherlock's eyes, He was about to be deduced, and he wasn't in the mood.

'Sherlock, one more word and you will not need morphine,' he told him, struggling to remain in control of his anger once more. Knowing how good it would feel to just give in and lash out at somebody, anybody, anything, but knowing that if he gave in then he wouldn't be able to stop.

'You were a doctor who went to war.' Oh God help him it was too late. And he knew how impossible it was to stop Sherlock mid-deduction. A precisely placed punch might do it, just one punch, he could stop at that surely as long as it was a good enough punch to ensure Sherlock kept his mouth. It would be a damage limitation exercise, he reasoned to himself, and in the end it was only concern for Sherlock's injuries that stopped him.

'You're a man who couldn't stay in the suburbs for more than a month without storming a crack den and beating up a junkie. Your best friend is a sociopath who solves crimes as an alternative to getting high. That's me, by the way,' he gave John an ironic wave. 'Hello.'

'Even the landlady used to run a drug cartel,' he said pointing at Mrs H. Seriously? He'd known that Mrs H's husband had been involved in dodgy dealings, but a drug cartel? Really?

'It was my husband's cartel. I was just typing,' she protested. No wonder Sherlock had thought she might have morphing in her kitchen.

'And exotic dancing,' Sherlock pointed out. Now that brought up images that John didn't want to think about.

'Sherlock Holmes, if you've been YouTube-ing...'

It would have been almost funny if the situation wasn't so serious. The idea of Sherlock looking at - no, that was somewhere he just didn't want his mind to go. He almost looked at Mary, knowing that she would find it as amusing as he did, but stopped himself just in time, remembering why they were there.

'John, you are addicted to a certain lifestyle,' Sherlock was continuing. 'You're abnormally attracted to dangerous situations and people. So is it truly such a surprise that the woman you've fallen in love with conforms to that pattern?'

What was he saying? That he had chosen Mary because he had seen her for what she was? Because he had seen that she was dangerous, that she had secrets, that's she was a woman who could and would do anything, and he had been attracted to that?

_No! Not her, not Mary. Everybody else in his life, maybe, but not her_. 'But, she wasn't supposed to be like that!' He blurted out, 'Why is she like that?' For the first time, he actually heard something of the distress he was feeling creep into his voice.

Sherlock's face contained a strange mixture of sorrow and compassion and something else, something deeper that John could not begin to identify.

'Because you chose her,' he said finally, and so definitively that John knew that It had to be true, he stood there, staring at his friend, wanting to argue with him, wanting him to say something - anything to absolve John of responsibility for this, but it didn't come.

'Why is everything - always - MY FAULT?' he shouted, furiously kicking out at the table next to Sherlock's chair, so that it flew across the room a short distance.

Mrs Hudson looked shocked, and murmured a warning about the neighbours. Even Sherlock jumped a little, perhaps wondering if he was next for the attack, but Mary, Mary the assassin, didn't even flinch. He turned towards her, watching her calm expression. How had he not realised? How had he not recognised her for what she was? He was a soldier for fuck's sake. He knew the hardness in a man's eyes when they could go out on patrol and shoot other human beings and then come back and laugh with their mates in the mess that evening as if nothing had happened. How could he not have recognised that look in her?

Sherlock's voice broke through the anger that threatened to consume him.

'John, listen. Be calm and answer me. What is she?'

'My lying wife?' John spat out.

'No. What is she?'

'The woman who's carrying my child who has lied to me since the day I met her?'

'No. Not in this flat; not in this room. Right here, right now, what is she?'

Bloody Sherlock. Of course. That what was he had brought her here, to 221B Baker Street. Because he knew that it was the only way that he could enable John to have to hear the facts, clearly and dispassionately, to be forced to look at this objectively. And there had to be a reason. For some reason, Sherlock seemed to think that Mary's story needed hearing. What was it he'd said to John only a few short hours ago, when he had only the tiniest inkling of how his life as going to be turned upside down? _'It's not what you think_.'

There was more to it. That was what Sherlock was trying to tell him. 'I'll take the case,' he had said to Mary. And he only took the case when it was interesting, or challenging, or when he liked the individual concerned. Sherlock genuinely liked Mary, John was aware of that. Not just for John's sake but for her own and Sherlock, whatever his flaws, was an excellent judge of character. So if he saw something in his lying, deceitful wife that John did not, then John could only do what he always did. He had to let Sherlock take the lead and follow this wherever it took him as he always did.

'Okay,' he said, turning to Sherlock before turning to contemplate his wife again, wondering how many more revelations this evening would hold. 'Your way. Always your way.'

He pulled out a chair and placed it where they always sat their clients, then sat down in his own chair, opposite Sherlock's.

'Sit,' he said to Mary,

'Why?'

She didn't even look sorry; she just looked - petulant almost, like a stubborn teenager who didn't want to be told what to do. Well not anymore. He was in charge now - him and Sherlock, and there was no way he was going to let Mary get out of this room until he knew exactly what was going on.

'Because that's where they sit,' he said, pointing at the chair while struggling to keep his voice calm. 'The people who come in here with their stories. The clients – that's all you are now, Mary. You're a client. This is where you sit and talk and this is where we sit and listen, then we decide if we want you or not.'

And Sherlock walked across to his chair, slowly, painfully and sat himself down opposite John, and for a moment he thought that Mary might refuse, but a look passed between her and Sherlock. 'She trusts him,' John realised with a start. 'She trusts him to do what is right.'

And Mary did as she was asked and took her seat on the chair before turning to John, for all the world as if she was at a job interview, and waited for him to start talking.

 

 


	22. Chapter 22

They were back to deadlock - John staring at Mary, Mary staring at John, neither of them wanting to speak first. And so yet again, it was Sherlock who broke the silence.

'Why don't we start with something simple. Who are you?'

Mary turned to him, a sarcastic smile playing on her lips.

'You think that's simple?'

'I very much assumed that it wasn't. Where would you have us start then?'

Mary turned to face John, and something slipped in her face as she looked at him. She went in a moment from being hard, angry, defensive to being - Mary. And she looked afraid and vulnerable, and despite his anger, he had the overwhelming impulse to go to her and hold her close, and tell that everything was going to be all right.

Perhaps something of what he as feeling showed in her face, but whatever the reason, she nodded slightly, as if she had made a decision, then reached inside her coat and pulled out a silver USB stick, which she placed on the table separating her from John.

Sherlock lent forward to look at it. 'A.G.R.A.' he said, reading the black lettering. 'What's that?'

John darted a glance at him. That he was in pain was obvious, but no hint of a deduction? No attempt at looking clever? What was he playing at?

'My initials,' came the reply, and John closed his eyes and looked away, unable to face the cold reality of what she was saying. Her name wasn't Mary, it wasn't even anything close. Who was she then this women that he was married to? And was their marriage even legal if she wasn't who she had claimed to be? John was married to Mary Morstan, a woman who didn't even exist. And the woman sat in the chair next to him, the woman carrying his child - he had no idea whatsoever who she was.

'Everything about who I was is on there,' Mary was saying, and then after a pause, 'If you love me, don't read it in front of me.'

His heart thudded in his chest. Love? She could still talk of love? She still thought that he could love her after all that he had discovered this evening, after all of the lies and the deception. _'Don't you_?' the voice whispered in his head. _'Don't you love her still, because isn't Sherlock right? Isn't there a part of you that is a little bit excited by the fact that she is - dangerous - different - secret?'_

He lifted his hand towards the stick, then stopped himself, illogically not wanting to touch it. '

Why?' he asked.

'Because you won't love me when you've finished,' she said. And the tears in her eyes were real, and John realised that whatever else she and lied about, her love for him wasn't part of it.

'And I don't want to see that happen,' she finished as John stared at her, wondering what on earth he was meant to do with all of this.

It was Mary who looked away first, and quickly, before he could change his mind, John snatched the USB stick up from the table, and pushed it deep into his pocket. Mary's meaning had been clear. Whatever was on there was for him to see, not Sherlock. And what he chose to share of it would be his decision. But like Pandora's box, once it was open it could not be unopened. The knowledge could never be unlearnt. It burnt like fire in his pocket, and he took a moment to compose himself, slowing his breathing, aware that Mary's attention had turned back to Sherlock.

'How much do you know already?' she asked him.

'By your skill set, you are – or were – an intelligence agent. Your accent is currently English but I suspect you are not. You're on the run from something; you've used your skills to disappear.

An intelligence agent? A spy? Was that was she was? And was that better or worse than an assassin? He shook his head unconsciously, as if he could shake the knowledge out of it.

'Magnussen knows your secret, which is why you were going to kill him,' Sherlock was saying. Of course. Mary's pressure point, Magnussen had been trying to use it to get her to do - what? What had he asked her to do that would make her risk her cover in order to try to kill him. After everything that Sherlock seemed to think that she had done, everything that was on that USB stick, what could he possibly have asked her to do that was so terrible that she would be prepared to risk the life that she had worked so hard to construct for herself for it?

'And I assume you befriended Janine in order to get close to him.'

So even their wedding had been used as part of the plot. John couldn't help feeling a stab of pity for Janine, played for a fool by not one but two of those people she thought she knew best within a matter of months.

'Oh, you can talk!' Mary quipped at Sherlock, as if they were talking about who had nicked the last cigarette from the packet when the others person's back was turned, and Sherlock smiled back at her in acknowledgement that they were two of a kind, both prepared to stoop to any depths to get what they wanted.

'Ohhh. Look at you two,' John interjected sarcastically, unable to cope with their smug self-congratulation, anger rising again. He pointed between the two of them. 'You should have got married,' he said, suddenly wondering if he hadn't inadvertently married a female version of Sherlock. And Sherlock looked - sheepish, as if the thought had occurred to him too.

 _'Maybe Sherlock was what I wanted all along_ ,' and the voice in his head was John's own this time. _'I lost him, and replaced him with another version of him who I felt was more socially acceptable. Is that what I did?'_

He remembered all all those sessions with Ella after Sherlock's apparent death. The number of times she had asked him about his feelings for Sherlock, feelings that went beyond friendship, and he had found himself completely unable to reply. Not because he didn't trust her, but because what he felt for Sherlock was so complex that it transcended the traditional divisions of friendship and love. It had been something deeper, more substantial, more permanent, more soul-defining than anything that he had ever experienced before or since. It had changed since Sherlock's return, but it was still there, that sense of completeness when he was around, that sense of loss when he wasn't. Had he settled for what he could get, knowing that Sherlock was married to his work and had no interest in any relationship outside friendship. Had he - had he...'

John mentally shook himself. Christ, look what she had done to him. He hadn't thought about Sherlock like that in a very long time, why start again now?

'The stuff Magnussen has on me, I would go to prison for the rest of my life,' Mary was saying, and John forced his attention back to the matter at hand.

'So you were just going to kill him?' he asked, still finding it hard to equate the woman sitting next to him, the woman who looked like his wife Mary Watson, who worked beside him in the surgery every day, with the cold-blooded assassin that he now knew her to be.

'People like Magnussen should be killed. That's why there are people like me,' Mary replied, and there was that hardness again that went beyond sarcasm, beyond practicality, beyond the black humour that came so easy to medical professionals as a source of self-defence. It wasn't self-defence for Mary, he had realised that long ago. She just had this uncanny ability to remain entirely emotionally detached from any situation - not like Sherlock. Sherlock had emotional empathy, but not cognitive empathy. He could recognise when people were upset, but not what they would find distressing. He remained genuinely puzzled by emotion. Mary on the other hand, knew exactly how and what would upset people, she just chose to distance herself from it, and seemed to find no difficulty in doing that. Of course she didn't. She had been trained to do exactly that.

'Perfect,' he said, gently punching the arm of the chair. 'So that's what you were? An assassin?'

'How could I not see that?' he asked Sherlock, but for once Sherlock remained silent and it was Mary who replied.

'You did see that,' she said.

And there was the anger again, rising fast in his chest, threatening to overwhelm him.

'And you married me,' she said, and then tilting her head towards Sherlock, 'Because he's right...'

John stared at Sherlock, who looked as if he had never wanted to be right less in his life. Who looked as if he felt responsible for all of this pain that was being inflicted on John, and as if he was devastated by it. Who looked - as if he cared more about this than John had ever seem him care about anything before.

Breaking his gaze away, he turned to his wife. 'It's what you like,' Mary was saying softly, as if she was breaking some awful truth to John. And so she was. She held his gaze for just a moment, and the compassion in her eyes was almost worst than all of the lies and deception of the evening. Christ, how was he ever going to pull his life back together after this?

'So - Mary,' Sherlock was saying, as if realising that John was now incapable of speech.

'Any documents that Magnussen has concerning yourself, you want - extracted and returned.'

What? Sherlock was still going to help her? After everything that she had done? Why? Why not just allow Mycroft to help her disappear?

'Why would you help me?' Mary asked, echoing Johns own thoughts.

'Because you saved my life.'

'Sorry, what?' John asked.

'When I happened on you and Magnussen - you had a problem,' Sherlock was saying, and John watched him slip into deduction mode, but with none of his normal pace or delight in the process.

'More specifically, you had a witness. The solution, of course, was simple. Kill us both and leave. However, sentiment got the better of you.'

Sentiment? She had spared Sherlock because of sentiment? Maybe John was right. Maybe Mary should have married Sherlock. Or had she - could she perhaps have spared Sherlock because she knew that John couldn't have lived with losing him for a second time? Had she realised what John himself was only now beginning to acknowledge?

'One precisely-calculated shot to incapacitate me,' Sherlock continued, 'In the hope that it would bide you more time to negotiate my silence. Of course, you couldn't shoot Magnussen. On the night that both of us broke into the building, your own husband would become a suspect,'

Christ, of course. How had he not thought of that? If John had been the only man left standing in a building full of dead bodies, he would have been suspect number one. Had she spared Sherlock simply to save him that?

'So you calculated that Magnussen would use the fact of your involvement rather than sharing the information with the police as is his M.O.. And then you left the way you came.'

There was no joy in Sherlock's voice in the deduction, only pain, although John suspected that this was as much from his physical injuries as from what he was revealing to John. Mary remained silent, but the look she gave Sherlock showed that he was correct.

'Have I missed anything?' he asked.

Sherlock may not of, but John felt that he certainly had.

'How did she save your life?' John asked.

'She phoned the ambulance,' Sherlock said.

'I phoned the ambulance!' John protested.

'She phoned first,' Sherlock explained. 'You didn't find me for another five minutes. Left to you, I would have died. The average arrival time for a London ambulance is -' he looked at his watch and as if on cue there was the sound of feet on the stairs and a paramedic and a technician burst into the room.

'Eight minutes,' Sherlock concluded breathlessly.

John's mind was racing all over again. Mary had called the ambulance? _Mary_? She had wanted to save Sherlock after all. It hadn't just been about saving John from being a suspect, she had wanted Sherlock to survive - why? When she must have known that he would never keep silent about this, that he would work out her secret.

 _'Because she wanted me to work it out,_ ' the voice in his head, Sherlock's voice, said. _'Because she wanted you to see John, she wanted you to know.'_

And Mary, Mary was staring at him as if he held her entire future in his hands. And so he did. And Sherlock, Christ, Sherlock was looking waxen. He had seen corpses with more colour. Wherever the majority of his circulating volume was at the moment, it wasn't in his peripheral circulation that was for sure. A fact that the consulting detective seemed to have deduced for himself.

'I believe I'm bleeding internally and my pulse is very erratic,' he was telling the paramedics. 'You may need to re-start my heart on the way,' he concluded, ever the drama queen.

His knees buckled as he tried to stand, and John ran forward to catch him, Mary moving as fast as he did, so that they grabbed him, one on each side to stop him from falling.

'John,' Sherlock said urgently, 'John – Magnussen is all that matters now. You can trust Mary. She saved my life.'

'She shot you,' John pointed out.

Sherlock pulled the face that meant he was aware that he'd made an error of judgement somewhere along the line, and hated to admit that he was wrong. 'Mixed messages, I grant you,' he said, then cried out in pain, and his hand slipped off John's shoulder.

'Sherlock!' John cried out in horror, then, 'All right, take him,' to the paramedics as they gently stepped in to help lower him down.

He stared at Sherlock as the paramedics got to work, placing an oxygen mask with high flow oxygen over his face to ease his ragged breathing, reaching for a cannula to give him the morphine that he had been asking for.

And John, John Watson the army doctor, who had always prided himself in keeping his head in a crisis, could only leave them to it, his mind completely devoid of practical knowledge for once. He simply stood and stared across at his wife, wondering why Sherlock was so desperate for him to know the truth that he had risked his life to ensure that John heard the entire truth now, at this time, and in precisely this way. And he had not just wanted John to know the truth, he had wanted him to hear it in a way that might, just possibly explain it, that would enable John to understand it.

 _'But I can't_ ,' he said silently to Sherlock, knowing that Sherlock was beyond hearing him _now. 'I can't forgive her Sherlock, how can I? How can you ask that of me?_

'I _ask everything of you John. I always have. But you promised to trust me.'_

_'I do trust you Sherlock. I just don't know how I can trust her.'_

_'Because I tell you that you can. Because you must._ '

John stood there silently shaking his head, staring at the floor now. Vaguely aware that the paramedics had strapped Sherlock onto the trolley, and were now moving at speed.

'Are you coming with us, sir?' they asked John. 'We need to get him to hospital ASAP.'

'You go on, I'll catch up,' John said vaguely, too dazed to move, waiting until he heard their feet reaching the bottom of the stairs, the murmured conversation with Mrs Hudson and the front door closing behind them before finally lifting his head to look at Mary again.

'We both know that you're going to go in that ambulance, John,' Mary said quietly. 'So we'd better do this quickly.'

'Why did he say that I could trust you?'

'Because you can. Because whatever lies I told to protect myself, I never lied about how I felt about you. Can you say the same?'

'So this is all about me now?'

'No - no,' Mary looked down and shook her head. 'I'm sorry, John. You may not believe that, but it's true. I am truly, deeply sorry for the lies that I told you. If you look at that USB stick then you'll understand why I did what I did. Why I had to keep my identity secret - even from you.'

Mrs Hudson's voice came up the stairs, 'John? The paramedics say they have to go now. What do you want to do?'

John could see the flashing blue lights through the curtains of 221b. What did he want to do? His wife and his child were here, and Sherlock was outside. Sherlock had told him that he could trust Mary and somehow he found that he couldn't hate her. He couldn't feel anything other than sadness at everything that he had lost, and it was paralysing.

'John!' Came Mrs Hudson's voice, 'You have to make a decision now. They need to leave.'

'Go!' Mary said, breaking him out of his trance. 'John, go with Sherlock! He needs you.'

'How can I?' he whispered, his voice cracking. 'After all that's happened this evening, how can I?'

'Because you don't have to choose, you idiot,' Mary told him, raising a soft hand to cup his cheek., and strangely he didn't shy away from it. 'You never had to choose. Now, go!'

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who has stuck with this story, despite the ridiculously long hiatus. And thank you for the reviews - they are what drives me to keep writing, and I really do appreciate each and every one of them.
> 
> And thank you to 7percentsolution, my amazingly patient and brilliant beta, for keeping me on course.
> 
> Transcript of HLV courtesy of Ariane Devere.


	23. Chapter 23

John nodded to the paramedic bending over Sherlock and pulled himself up into the back of the ambulance. The rear door was shut rapidly behind him, and then there was the slamming of the driver's door and John barely had time to sit himself on the bench opposite Sherlock's stretcher before the ambulance moved off.

'I'm here,' he said quietly, reaching over to grasp Sherlock's hand, white and immobile on the red blanket, as the paramedic buckled himself into the jump seat next to Sherlock's head, but there was no response.

'Where are you taking him to?' he asked the paramedic.

'UCH is the closest.'

John shook his head. 'No, he needs to go back to The Royal London. He did a bunk from there this afternoon. That's where his cardio-thoracic surgeon is. He needs to get back there.'

'Sorry, mate - they can transfer later if they want. I'm not keeping him in the back of this ambulance any longer than I have to when he's doing that,' he indicated the monitor mounted on the wall of the ambulance. John had been so distracted, he hadn't even noticed it. It showed a heart rate that was dangerously fast at 170 beats per minute, with wide complexes.

John muttered an expletive under his breath. 'You medical?' The paramedic asked.

'GP and ex-army doctor. I spent fourteen years with the Royal Army Medical Corps.'.

The paramedic handed him the 12 lead ECG. The rhythm was unmistakable. Ventricular tachycardia. Sherlock's antics that afternoon and evening had pushed his already stressed heart into a potentially life-threatening arrhythmia. He was lucky that he hadn't had a cardiac arrest already, and the longer he stayed in that rhythm the more likely it was to deteriorate into ventricular fibrillation, at which point cardiac arrest was inevitable

'What's his blood pressure with that?' John asked.

'80/40. And I can't get a line in. His veins are all shot. That's why we're going to scoop and run.

John swore softly under his breath, as he unbuckled his seat belt and bent over Sherlock, instructing the paramedic to squeeze first one arm and then the other above the elbow to form a human tourniquet, always John's preferred device, but he was right. The veins that John could find were hard, inelastic, thrombosed from recent use, and John could find nothing that he could get a cannula into. Then his eyes slid to Sherlock's shirt collar, and a slight lump underneath it on the left. Had he -?

He pushed it to one side, and found himself grinning despite the grimness of the situation. 'Central line any good to you?' he asked the paramedic, showing him the triplet of clear tubing entering Sherlock's neck just above his left clavicle. Sherlock had obviously found it too difficult to remove, stitched in place as it was and so had simply left it where it was. It might just be about to save his life.

'You got amiodarone?' John asked, naming the drug of choice for kicking a heart back into its normal rhythm.

'In the arrest pack, but I'm not licensed to give it apart from in arrest.'

'I am,' John said crisply. 'You're not even going to get him to UCH at this rate. Where do you keep the drugs?'

...

The first dose of amiodarone hadn't done it, nor had the second. Sherlock's blood pressure had simply dropped even lower. John lent over and shook Sherlock's shoulder.T there was a low groan, but no other response.

'You got any anaesthetic drugs?' he asked. 'Propofol, ketamine, midazolam, anything we can sedate him with?'

The paramedic shook his head. 'Nothing,' he said.

'Then why don't you give him a bit more morphine and we'll shock him with that.'

The paramedic looked mildly horrified, 'You want to shock him while he's awake?'

'Well he's not exactly awake, is he,' John said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, 'and if we don't shock him now, we'll be shocking him in about -' he looked at his watch, 'Five minutes when his heart has stopped because he's gone into ventricular fibrillation. By which time we still won't be at UCH with this traffic. Which would you rather?'

'Your responsibility?'

'All mine,' John agreed with a nod.

The paramedic shouted to the technician to pull over, no shocking in a moving ambulance of course, too risky for all involved. Without waiting for him to stop, John braced himself on the side of the stretcher with one hand, and with the other flipped the monitor to defibrillate mode, and charged the pads already attached to Sherlock's chest, the characteristic beep of full charge sounding just as the ambulance pulled to a halt.

He started at 150 Joules, yelling to the paramedic to remove the oxygen and stand clear before he pressed the shock button. Sherlock's body jolted upwards and he cried out in pain as the shock was applied, but the cardiac rhythm remained stubbornly unchanged.

'Come on, Sherlock,' John whispered, as he turned the charge up to 200 joules. Once again, Sherlock's body jolted as the charge was applied, but this time, mercifully, it worked. The ECG trace when it returned after the spike of the charge was back in a normal rhythm, fast but no longer in the potentially deadly ventricular tachycardia. The pulse under John's fingers when he dropped his hand to Sherlock's wrist felt stronger, less thready, and Sherlock's eyelids were already fluttering as if he was trying to wake up.'

'Change of plan, we're going to The London,' he shouted to the technician in the drivers seat.

'UCH is closer,' the paramedic protested.

'Yes it is, but we're going to the London,' John told him firmly as he removed the stethoscope from round the paramedics neck and used it to listen to Sherlock's chest before adding, 'His haemothorax has come back. He needs James Macpherson's services. He's the best in London and I'm not having anyone else delving around in this man's chest.'

...

James Macpherson had sounded unsurprised when John had phoned him to tell him Sherlock was on his way to A&E by ambulance.. 'Mycroft Holmes has had me on standby ever since Sherlock was found missing,' he told him. 'What's your ETA?'

'Ten minutes,' John told him, after checking with the paramedic.

'I'll have a team standing by in the Trauma Bay. Does he need blood?'

'Probably,' John said. 'He's white as a sheet and hypotensive. Sounds as if he's got a good couple of litres in the right side of his chest.

'I'll get the ER set up as well then. Any possibility of new injuries?'

'No, he's just ripped a hole back in his lung, by the sound of it, or possibly the IVC has gone again, although I think it came on too slowly for that. Difficult to tell in the back of an ambulance.'

'Sats?'

'92% on 15 litres oxygen, heart rate is 135, blood pressure 84/40. We've got fluid running but the only access we've got is the central line so they're running slowly.'

'Kind of him to leave that in for us,' James Macpherson said dryly. 'The VT is a little concerning, but then I've never had a patient running round London five days after major cardiac surgery before. Irritated post-operative myocardium doesn't tend to take kindly to that. I'll activate the Trauma Team and make sure we're set up for you.'

...

John recognised several of the faces in the ED Resuscitation room and felt the irrational need to apologise for his friend requiring their services for the second time in less than a week.

Once again, the mechanics of the trauma team took over, and Sherlock was swiftly moved across to the resuscitation room trolley, and then disappeared from John's view between a sea of brightly coloured tabards.

James Macpherson was there waiting, still in his blue scrubs from theatre, or perhaps he had donned then ready for the inevitable trip there with Sherlock. He left the ED Consultant to lead the Trauma Team, but directed his registrar to insert the chest drain into the right side of Sherlock's thorax once the presence of another massive haemothorax had been confirmed by ultrasound.

Venous access had been tricky, and the blood had flowed painfully slowly into the central line before they had managed to place a cannula with ultrasound guidance. 'Short and thick does the trick,' thought John, watching how much faster the blood from the bag of red cells flowed into the short, wide cannula than it had into the long, thin central line. Poiseuilles law in action - Sherlock would have loved the science in that.

Sherlock himself was barely responsive, his face half hidden beneath the oxygen mask, beads of sweat standing out on his pale forehead.

Why had he done it? That was the question that John found himself entirely unable to answer. Why put his life in danger by doing a bunk from the hospital only days after major surgery just so that he could enable John to listen to Mary's story first hand? Why not wait, if he felt unable to tell him himself? What had been the urgency, and more to the point, why did he care so much about John understanding what Mary had done - no more, about him trusting Mary, that he would be prepared to risk his life for it?

'It's not the first time though is it?' said a voice in John's head, and the voice this time was, uncomfortably Mary's. 'It's not the first time that he's risked his life for you, John. The jump from the roof, the dive into the bonfire, concealing my identity from the police to protect you even though it meant I could potentially go back and finish the job, and now tonight. How many times does he have to risk his life to prove how much you mean to him?'

John swallowed hard, remembering Mary's words from earlier that evening. 'You don't have to choose between us.' Was it possible that his wife - his clever, lying, deceptive, secret services trained wife realised what he hadn't? That Sherlock's feelings for John went far beyond friendship. That they went deep enough for him to risk his life for John's time and again. What had he said about John at the wedding? 'The best man that I have ever known.' Had he meant that in ways that John had not even begun to suspect until now?

He headed for a chair in the corner of the resuscitation room and sat down hard, brushing off the concerned hand of one of the nurses. 'I'm fine,' he murmured.

But he wasn't, he wasn't fine at all. He looked at the immobile figure of Sherlock Holmes, hovering close to death yet again and all he could think was, 'What if he dies without me being able to tell him that I finally understand?'


	24. Chapter 24

Forty-five minutes later, and John found himself once again sitting, waiting in the chairs outside the operating theatres. A CT scan had confirmed that the bleeding was coming from the right lung, as if the accumulating level of the blood draining from the tube in Sherlock's chest wasn't enough proof. From the scanner, the decision had been made to take him straight back to theatre. The Inferior Vena Cava looked intact, with no leak on the scan, and no evidence that the pericardial effusion had re-accumulated, and for that, at least, John was grateful.

He scrolled through the messages on his phone as he sat waiting. Several from Lestrade, who had been informed of Sherlock's return by the ambulance service, obviously alerted to report any shouts to collapsed idiots with a history of a recent gunshot wounds. And one from Mary, stilted in its politeness, asking him to update her as soon as he could, to let her know that Sherlock was going to be okay.

He fired off a text to Molly before he did anything else, knowing that she'd be worried, chose to ignore the one from Mary, who he considered almost as guilty as Sherlock in contributing to his current condition, and was trying to hit the right combination of sarcasm and apology to Greg Lestrade when he heard the clipping of very expensive shoes coming towards him, and then the sag of his chair as somebody sat down next to him on the row of seats.

'So here we are again,' Mycroft Holmes said quietly.

'I assumed that they would have let you know that he'd been found.'

'I rather hoped that you might have done that yourself, John.'

'I was - busy,' John said, wondering how much Mycroft knew.

'So I understand.'

John looked at him sharply, wondering if Mycroft really had eyes and ears everywhere, then made the connection. 'Mrs Hudson?' he asked.

'Alerted me to your telephone call from Sherlock, and his return to 221b, yes.'

'Did she tell you what -'

'No. She was strangely reticent about the contents of the conversation that went on after his return.'

John felt relief flood through him.

'Is she a risk, John?'

'Mrs Hudson?'

'Don't play the fool. It doesn't suit you,' Mycroft snapped. 'You know precisely who I mean. Is your wife a risk to Sherlock?'

'No. If she'd wanted to kill him that night at Magnussen's office, then she would have done so. She deliberately kept him alive.'

'The fact that she called the ambulance herself certainly suggests that.'

'You knew about that?'

'You think that I wouldn't have listened to the 999 call, John? I'm surprised that Lestrade didn't think of that himself, if only to verify the time-line of events. But then, I did have it deleted fairly rapidly.'

'You - protected Mary?'

'Initially so that I could try to track her back to her handler. I assumed that she had been sent by a third party to dispatch Magnussen. While her decision to shoot Sherlock was a little alarming, I agree with your conclusions. Had she meant to dispatch him, then she would have done so at the time. I had her closely watched following the shooting, of course. You were never in any danger.

'How very reassuring,' John said dryly. 'How did you know that it was her?'

'I recognised her voice on the 999 call, and had her speech patterns analysed to confirm it. That wedding video of yours came in handy for something, after all.

John groaned.

'For what it's worth, John, I'm sorry,' Mycroft said, and for once John actually believed him. 'You deserve some happiness.'

John looked at him and frowned, waiting for the quip, the sarcastic follow-up, but it never came.

'Do you know why he did it?' John asked.

'Why my brother risked his life to run around London only days after major cardio-thoracic surgery in order to let you hear the truth about your wife from her own lips?'

'That would be the one,' John said tightly, wondering why neither Holmes brother was capable of candy-coating even the harshest of truths when their parents appeared so normal and well adjusted.

'I suggest that you ask him yourself, when he wakes up.'

'Help me out here, Mycroft.'

'I think that you know John. If you don't, then you're more of a fool than I took you for.'

'Sentiment?' John asked after a long pause.

'Perhaps something more than that. But then what would I know?'

'Mycroft -'

'Talk to Sherlock about it John, not to me.'

John sighed and closed his eyes. 'But it's not that simple, is it? He'll never talk about it; you know that.'

'How do you know unless you try?'

And by the time that John had processed this, Mycroft Holmes had disappeared, as suddenly as he had arrived.

...

He was allowed into recovery to sit with Sherlock before they transferred him back to intensive care. The plan, they told him, was to keep him intubated overnight, transfuse him up, and then aim to extubate him the following day, or rather later that day, as the clock had ticked from eleven to twelve to one o'clock in the morning while Sherlock was in theatre. The flow of blood in the chest drain had slowed to a trickle now that the main source of the leak had been repaired, and James MacPherson was cautiously optimistic.

'This will prolong his recovery time,' he told John, 'but I don't think he's done himself any permanent damage. If he can behave himself then he'll be out of here in a couple of weeks.'

'No more episodes of VT?' John asked.

'Just one short run of it when we got too close to the ventricle. It settled nicely with some magnesium. I want him on bed rest for at least a week though. That hilum has had enough of a bashing. I wouldn't want to have to go back in for a third time.'

John had thanked him, and settled back into his seat beside Sherlock. When they transferred him to ITU, he went with him, and was amused to discover that Sherlock had been allocated a private room, this time with two of Mycroft's plain clothes security officers placed on the door. Mycroft might not believe that Mary was a threat any more, but he certainly wasn't going to take the risk of Sherlock escaping again.

Almost without thinking, John reached out for Sherlock's hand, lying pale and white on the sheet, and squeezed it. Whatever it took to keep Sherlock in hospital for the next two weeks he would do it, even if it meant staying right next to him for all of that time.

And then there was Mary - Mary, his lying, deceitful wife, who Sherlock was so sure that he could trust. Mary, who was carrying his child. Christ, what a mess it all was. He looked at Sherlock, lying so still on the white sheet, his chest rising and falling with the hiss of the ventilator, looked at his eyelashes curling slightly as they lay on his cheek and the faint freckles across the bridge of his nose that he had never noticed before and squeezed his hand a little tighter.

Sherlock had risked his life to keep a vow that he had sworn, ' _Whatever it takes, whatever happens, from now on I swear I will always be there, always, for all three of you.'_

_'Whatever it takes.'_

_'For all three of you_.'

Even if it meant risking his life.

The stupid, stupid, idiot. Couldn't he see? Didn't he get it? Sherlock was set on keeping him and Mary together no matter what. John, however, wasn't so sure. Sherlock told him that he should trust Mary, but how could he? When she had lied to him about everything? About her past. About who she was. About what she was. And the baby? Had she lied about that too? What if - what if?'

Was that what Sherlock had been trying to tell him? _'You can trust Mary_.' Was that what he had meant? That his wife might have lied about her past, but that everything else was true? Was that what he had risked his life to make John believe?

Because if Sherlock was nothing else, he was an excellent judge of character. And Sherlock liked Mary. He was genuinely fond of her – as Mary was of him.

And yet Mary had shot Sherlock.

And still Sherlock wanted John to trust her.

And the vow – the one at the wedding had been not just to John, but to all three of them. John, and Mary, and the baby. And that spoke volumes about how highly he thought of her.

The thoughts went round and round in his head, until finally, lulled by the hypnotic beep of the monitor and the late hour, John fell into an uneasy doze, still with one hand firmly grasping Sherlock's.


	25. Chapter 25

  
Leaving the hospital just as dawn was breaking, John had found himself facing a dilemma. Where did he go from here? Not figuratively, that was a decision that could not be made in one evening, but literally. He couldn't face going back to Mary and the flat. For one brief moment he contemplated just staying in a hotel, to be close to Sherlock, but in the end, the call of the familiar was too great and he found himself asking the cab driver to take him to Baker Street.

Mrs Hudson, ever an early riser, was clattering about in the kitchen when he let himself in through the street door and came out to meet him.

'John! Is he okay? Sherlock, I mean? My goodness, he looked so awful when they put him into that ambulance.'

'He's fine, Mrs H. Well - he's back in intensive care, but he's going to be fine. I'm sorry, I should have phoned to let you know. I thought I'd try to get a few hours sleep here before I went back to see him, saves the trek back to Richmond. If that's okay with you, of course.'

'Of course, John. Anytime, you know that. I made your bed up for you.'

'Thank you, Mrs H,' John said, as he slowly started up the stairs. The room looked exactly as he'd left it, and there was his chair, back where it should be. Blocking Sherlock's view to the kitchen.

He started for the stairs that led to his bedroom, but instead, turned, and walked down the passageway to Sherlock's room instead. He wasn't sure what he was looking for. Sherlock hadn't been back there since the day of the shooting. The day that he had found Janine coming out of Sherlock's bedroom and his world had turned upside down.

Sherlock's bed was neatly made, and there was a single long, dark hair on the pillow on the far side of the bed. Janine's of course. So she really had slept here, although Sherlock, of course, hadn't; he had spent that night getting high in the squat. What had Janine thought of that, John wondered? He  sat down on the bed for a moment, hand absently stroking the pillow on Sherlock's side of the bed, wondering just for a moment what it would be like to sleep in that bed beside Sherlock. Had Janine ever found out? She must have done, he assumed. And what had they -

He stopped that train of thought there. It didn't matter what had or hadn't happened with Janine. It had gone somewhere beyond kissing and not as far as sleeping with, and that was the end of that. None of his business. So why did he mind so much?

Was he jealous? Of Janine. Did he want - what did he want?

John gave himself a mental shake, patted the pillow one last time, and went up the stairs to his old bedroom, shutting the door tight shut behind him out of habit.

...........................

Despite his exhaustion, it took John a long time to fall asleep. Being here, in his old bed felt wrong somehow. He missed Mary's quiet breathing beside him, missed her warmth and her weight on the mattress. Sleep when it did come, was full of uneasy dreams, of Mary raising a gun to shoot first Sherlock, then him, again and again. Through it all, Mycroft danced round them in a jester's hat, waving a stick with bells on it, calling them all fools.

He woke with a thumping headache and a dry mouth, opening his eyes with a jolt of disorientation until he remembered why he was back in Baker Street, and slowly, painfully, the events of the previous day came back to him. He resisted the urge to hide his head under the pillow, like a child, in the hope that it would all go away, and instead made his way sleepily downstairs in search of paracetamol.

The coffee might have moved, but the tin of medication was where it had always been. Unable to resist, John rifled through it to see if Sherlock had added any less readily available drugs to the stock, but he found nothing that couldn't be bought in a supermarket or the High Street chemist.

Two paracetamol and a pint of water later, and John was ready for a shower - and then he realised his error. He didn't have any clean clothes here; they were all back in Richmond, and while he was fairly sure that Sherlock wouldn't mind John borrowing his, Sherlock was at least four inches taller and substantially skinnier than John. That and his predilection for well-fitted shirts meant that unless John wanted to face the world in a washed out t-shirt and a pair of rolled up pyjama trousers, he was going to have to head back to Richmond to get a change of clothes after all.

He checked his watch - half two. Good, Mary would still be at work. He could be in and out before she got home. He couldn't face that conversation just yet. Time enough for that when he had worked out what the hell he was going to say to her.

He briefly considered a cab, but instead elected for the tube, picking up a coffee from the Costa next to Baker Street station. There was something soothing about walking down the familiar metal-capped steps of the station, through the barriers with a tap of his Oyster card, and then heading for the steps towards the Circle line, without having to check the signs. He noticed two Japanese tourists, gesticulating wildly at the signs, clutching a paper tube map, obviously confused by its brightly coloured lines and the myriad of routes it presented. He considered stopping to help them but rapidly pushed the idea away. This wasn't a day to look after others. This was a day to get to Richmond as quickly as he could, change his clothes, pick up a few essentials and then get back to Sherlock.

His coffee was finished by the time he got to Hammersmith, and he arrived at the district line platform just as the train to Richmond was pulling in and less than twenty minutes later he was putting his key into the lock of the flat that he shared with Mary.

He pulled his coat off and walked into the sitting room to throw it on a chair, then stopped dead when he realised that Mary was sitting at the table, tapping away at her laptop.

'I thought you'd be at work,' he said.

'I called in sick. Couldn't face it. John, I -'

'Not now,' John said wearily. 'I can't do this now. I've just come back to get changed, pick up some stuff, and get back to the hospital.'

  
'Did you read it?'

'No,' John said, realising that he'd almost forgotten about the memory stick. He had transferred it from his trouser pocket to the inside pocket of his coat in the cab back to Baker Street this morning, and there it had stayed.

'Are you going to read it?'

'I don't know,' he said, staring at her sitting there, so calm, apparently so unaffected by this.

'Tell me one thing,' he said suddenly, 'Is it mine?'

'What?'

'The baby, Mary. Is it mine?'

'Is it-' Mary went white. 'Christ, John, what do you think that I am? Of course, the baby is yours. There's been nobody else. Not since we got together. I swear to you. I may have lied about my past, but I've never lied about how I feel about our relationship or how I feel about you.'

'And how can I believe you? Tell me that Mary? After everything that you've hidden from me, how can I believe you?'

'Because Sherlock told you that you could. And you trust Sherlock.'

John stared at her. The words had been spoken calmly, but her face was anything but.

'John, please,' she started.

'I can't, Mary, I'm sorry,' he said, his voice cracking. 'I haven't even had time to begin to process this. All I can think about at the moment is Sherlock is lying in that hospital bed.'

'Because of me,' Mary said quietly, 'it's okay, John, you can say it. He's lying there because I'd me.'

'Why couldn't you just have shot him in the leg, Mary?' John asked. 'Why shoot him in the chest if you didn't want to kill him.'

'I had to think quickly. I didn't want to shoot him in the head, if he survived he could never have coped with that. A leg or even an abdominal wound would have left him able to expose me. I couldn't risk that.'

'But his chest, Mary? You shot him in the middle of his chest. You nearly got him in the heart, for fuck's sake.'

'His bloody buttons were crooked, John,' Mary said urgently. 'I thought that I was further to the right than I was. I was going for lung, not the mediastinum. I wouldn't do that to him, you have to believe me, John - I care about him too, don't you see? I didn't want to have to shoot him.'

'So why did you?'

'Because I care about you more,' Mary whispered.

'I'm going to have a shower,' John said, breaking off eye contact. 'And then I'm going to get back to the hospital. I'll stay at Baker Street for a while. It's closer.'

'Closer to who, John?'

'You told me that you wouldn't make me choose,' John said through gritted teeth, walking up so close to Mary that their noses were almost touching. 'You said that I wouldn't have to choose.'

'You don't, John.'

'I don't understand you,' John muttered, walking into the bathroom and slamming the door behind him. When he emerged, ten minutes later, showered and shaved, Mary had gone and the flat was empty. He packed quickly, not wanting to risk the prospect of another difficult conversation, and found himself in a taxi and on his way back to Baker Street with a sense of relief less than an hour later. 


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter comes with huge thanks to J_Baillier for the med-picking and general inspiration, and to 7PercentSolution for the fabulous betaing and setting me straight, as always.

When John returned to the unit, he found Sherlock asleep; no longer sedated, no longer intubated, his face half hidden by an oxygen mask, the back of his bed raised.

Sherlock groaned slightly as he shifted his sleep, then opened his eyes, trying to push off the oxygen mask.

'Leave that, you need it,' John told him as he blinked, and tried to focus on John.

'John.'

'Welcome back,' John said.

Sherlock closed his eyes again, then opened them quickly, as if in doing so he could find himself in different surroundings. 'What happened?' he asked, his voice muffled by the mask.

'What happened when?' John asked, suddenly uneasy at the thought that Sherlock's brain might have been affected by the period of low blood pressure after his collapse.

'I was in Baker Street.'

'You collapsed,' John told him. 'You went into VT. Had to shock you in the back of the ambulance - yet another new experience that you've provided me with. And you poured a couple of litres of blood back into your chest from your right hilum. Earned yourself a trip back to theatre and another thoracotomy.'

Sherlock closed his eyes again. 'Hurts,' he murmured.

'Yeah, well that's what you get from having two thoracotomies in just over a week. James Macpherson says he wouldn't recommend a third, by the way, just in case you're thinking of doing any more escape acts. Sounds as if trying to out any more stitches in the hilum of your lung at the moment would be a bit like trying to weld an exhaust back on to the bottom of a car that's ninety percent rust.'

Sherlock blinked at him in confusion, then winced again.

'Yeah, I know, sorry. Probably a bit much to process at the moment,' John said, as he reached over and pressed the PCA button for Sherlock, watching the relief flood his face as the alfentanil took hold.

'Bad?'' he asked John eventually, and John noted the effort it was taking him to speak. His respiratory rate was high now that he was awake and he was wincing with each breath, despite the PCA. John pressed the button for him a second time, making a note to ask them to increase the infusion rate.

'You going to tell me what that was all about?' he asked when he was sure the opiate had taken hold. 'You could have just told me you know.'

'You wouldn't have believed me.'

'No, probably not. But still - did you really have to go that far?'

'It was important.'

'Important enough to risk your life for? You nearly died, Sherlock, again. Do you think you could please stop scaring me like that? Next time just talk to me, will you promise me that?'

You had to hear it from Mary herself.'

'Yes, well, you accomplished that. No more escape acts.'

'Magnussen.'

'What does he have to do with this?'

'Everything.'

But before John could ask him to explain further, the analgesia took hold and he was asleep again.

...

The next few days and nights blurred into each other as John held vigil by Sherlock's bedside, unwilling to leave him in case he made another bid for freedom. Mycroft's guards had miraculously melted away - whether because he was satisfied that Mary no longer represented a threat, or because he was aware that Sherlock wasn't in a fit state to go anywhere at the moment, John couldn't tell.

Sherlock remained on the High Dependence Unit, as complication after complication arose. On day 2 after surgery, he spiked a temperature, which was put down to a post-operative chest infection and treated with antibiotics. But despite the intravenous domestos that he was effectively being given, his fever refused to budge, and when John looked at his blood results, carefully documented twice a day on the charts at the end of his bed, he could see that the white cell count and C-reactive protein, both indications of bacterial infection, were climbing by the day. Wherever the infection was, whatever was causing it, the antibiotics that they were giving him weren't working. And more worryingly, the amount of oxygen that he was requiring to keep his arterial oxygen levels at a reasonable level was slowly creeping up.

James Macpherson and the constant stream of Intensivists looking after Sherlock were all reassuringly calm in the early days. Infection was not unexpected, they said, after two operations within a short duration of time, both of them emergencies. John just had to be patient and give the antibiotics a chance to work. But he couldn't brush off the uneasy feeling that there was something more sinister going on than a simple chest infection.

When John returned to the unit on the fourth morning, it was to find the ward round in progress, with five clinicians clustered round Sherlock's bed trying to work out the next step. His oxygen saturations had dropped overnight and they had started him on Optiflow, a system of humidified oxygen that delivered a small amount of positive pressure support. They were starting to talk about non-invasive ventilation if his respiratory rate remained elevated and his numbers didn't improve.

James MacPherson nodded at John in greeting when he noticed him waiting in the doorway. They were discussing a central line change and a return to basic principles: remove and replace all lines, take a culture of everything that couldn't be removed and could be cultured, organise an ultrasound of his abdomen looking for bacteria cultures, order another chest x-ray.

'Empyema?' John asked, naming the collection of pus in the chest cavity that could occur following a traumatic injury or surgery.

James Macpherson shook his head. 'It's a bit early for that, and nothing showed up on the CT scan we did a couple of days ago. If he doesn't improve by tomorrow, then we'll rescan his chest and abdomen to look for a collection, but that's likely to require sedation and intubation as he drops his oxygen saturations when we lie him flat. I'd rather not go down that route if we can avoid it.'

'Everything else stable?' John asked, not wanting to hear the answer.

'His kidney function is dropping off a little, and he's still requiring inotropes to maintain his blood pressure.'

'Sepsis?'

'That's the working diagnosis. We just need to find the source, but all of the cultures are coming back negative.'

'Sherlock would work it out,' John couldn't help thinking. 'Sherlock would work out exactly what was going on, doctor or not. So why can't I?'

Sherlock himself seemed to be becoming weaker with each passing day, barely able to stay awake for more than five minutes, and John could get little conversation out of him.

Then that evening, as John sat reading the paper on his iPad, waiting for him to wake up, he looked up to see Sherlock looking at him.

'You okay?' he asked.

'I'm still here?'

'Yes, of course you're still here. Where else would you be?'

'Where's Mary?'

'At home, I would imagine.'

'You should be with her.'

'Why? What is this, Sherlock?'

'No John, listen to me, you should be with Mary, it's important.' Sherlock groped towards John with a hand, and John took it and held it. It was hot, and dry as a bone. His temperature must have shot up again.

'Sherlock, you're not talking sense, what are you -'

And then he realised. Sherlock really wasn't talking sense. He was staring at John, eyes wild with confusion, because that was what he was- delirious.

'Sherlock, where do you think that you are?'

'Baker Street, of course. Why are you here?'

'You're not in Baker Street, you're in hospital. You've been ill; that's all. You're in the HDU at The Royal London. You've been here for days.'

'Magnussen. Magnussen was here.'

'No, Sherlock. He wasn't here . You're just a little confused from the drugs they've been giving you'

'No, he was here, John. He was in the flat, I saw him. He was here with Mary, they were going to -'

And then he broke off, trying to pull the oxygen mask off his face, and John rang the bell for help.

'Leave that; you need it,' he told him, but Sherlock was frantic now, clawing at John's hands.

'Can't breathe,' Sherlock was panting, trying to push John's hands away.

'It's fine, you're just panicking, slow your breathing down, John said, and then he glanced up at the alarming oxygen saturations and realised that it wasn't fine at all. Sherlock's oxygen saturations had dropped precipitously, and he was gasping for breath, no longer fighting against the mask.

John didn't hesitate - he pulled the crash bell and turned the oxygen through the Optiflow machine up as high as it would go.

'Sherlock, are you in pain?' he asked, watching Sherlock's face twist into a grimace.

'Back,' Sherlock gasped, 'Back hurts. Hurts to breathe. Help me,' and then John was surrounded by people, dropping Sherlock flat, applying a bag and mask to his face, starting to ventilate him, calling for drugs and preparing to intubate him as his oxygen saturations dropped even further and his blood pressure dropped precipitously.

'He's having a massive P.E, you need to do something,' he shouted to anyone who would listen.

'We are doing something, John. You need to come and wait outside now,' the ward sister told him calmly, putting an arm round his shoulders and steering him away from the bed.

'I want to help. I'm a doctor, I-'

'John, listen to me. You need to leave him to us. You need to let us work, okay? Come this way.'

And John allowed himself to be led out of the unit and into the relatives room, where he sank onto the sofa, head in hands, and for the first time since this whole sorry business had begun, burst into tears.

...

It was James Macpherson who came to update John, after what felt like an eternity of waiting but in reality was probably less than half an hour. The ward staff had come in regularly to tell him that they were doing what they could, and to offer him cups of tea that he didn't want. 'We are doing everything that we can,' they told him. He knew what that meant. He had said it himself to too many relatives in the past. It meant that they thought that what they were doing wasn't enough. It meant that they thought Sherlock was going to die.

'What's happening?' he asked James Macpherson as soon as he came through the door.

'We're trying to get him stable enough for scan.'

'Why not just thrombolyse? It's barn-door surely? Post-operative, sudden onset shortness of breath, chest pain, hypoxia and hypotension. He's thrown a massive clot to his pulmonary artery. It can't be anything else.

But James Macpherson shook his head. 'It's too risky, John. That hilum is too damaged. He could well ex-sanguinate into his chest drain. Besides is not necessarily a P.E., it could be an aortic dissection or a suture seam that's given way. We need a diagnosis first.'

'So if it is a massive P.E. and you can't thrombolyse, then what's the alternative?'

'Embolectomy, if it comes to it.'

'But you said you didn't want to have to go in again.'

'They could do it with interventional radiology, but let's not jump the gun. We need a diagnosis first, then we can come up with a plan.'

John nodded slightly, then hesitated before asking. 'What are his chances, James? I mean realistically, it isn't looking good, I know that.'

'You know the drill, John. Statistics are all well and good for the lay person, but as medics we all know that a 70% chance of survival is great if you're in the 70%, but if you're in the unlucky 30% , then you're still 100% dead.'

'Give me an idea, James.'

'He's got a reasonable chance if we can work out what's going on and get him treated quickly. If we can't get to the bottom of this, and he continues to deteriorate, then we could be facing some very difficult decisions in the next twenty-four hours. That's the best answer that I can give you at the moment.'

'Fair enough,' John said quietly. 'I'd better let his brother know.'

...

'What the hell is that?' John breathed, as James MacPherson showed him the CT scan an hour later. Sherlock's lungs were full of small cavitating nodules, anything up to a few centimetres in diameter, and even the vessels showed evidence of them, cutting off flow in some places.

'Septic emboli,' James MacPherson told him. 'Foxed the Radiologists as well. They're rare, probably came from his central line. They grew staph from it, but we assumed it was a contaminant. At least, we know what we're treating him for now.'

'So what - clusters of bacteria have been growing in his central line and then shooting off through the circulation to lodge in his lungs?'

'Seems likely, yes. The line change earlier on might well have thrown off a whole shower of them which would explain why he suddenly deteriorated.'

'And treatment is - what – different antibiotics?'

'And ventilation until his respiratory function improves. Now that the line that was the source of the infection has been removed, he should start to pick up in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explanatory Notes and Definitions
> 
> VT - Ventricular Tachycardia, a fast, broad complex heart rhythm arising from the ventricle that usually leads to low blood pressure, and if untreated to cardiac arrest.
> 
> PCA - Patient Controlled Analgesia. A mechanism by which post-operative patients can control their own pain by pressing a button to have intravenous analgesia delivered from a pump, rather than having to call a nurse to administer it.
> 
> Non- invasive ventilation - A way of delivering higher concentrations and pressures of oxygen to patients via a tight fitting mask which is strapped to the face. This effectively blows air into the lungs, improving ventilation and reducing the effort required to breathe. There are two types - CPAP, continuous positive airway pressure, used mainly when oxygen levels are low and BiPAP, bilevel positive airway pressure which is used when there is a problem with the mechanics of breathing and pressure is needed both on breathing in and breathing out.
> 
> P.E. - pulmonary embolus, a blood clot on the lungs, which if big enough impedes the flow of blood to the lungs and reduces the ability of the lung to oxygenate the blood. Big P.E.s present exactly like this - sudden onset shortness of breath and chest pain which is worse on breathing, and patients have low oxygen saturations, low blood pressure and look (and often feel) as if they're going to die. The gold standard for diagnosis is a CT scan, but the problem is the really big ones make patients too poorly to get to scan, so we tend to diagnose them by bedside echo, looking for a big right ventricle. Treatment is with thrombolysis, or clot-busting drugs, but post-surgery that's usually pretty risky.
> 
> Anything else you'd like defined, please let me know!


	27. Chapter 27

John should have realised that it was never going to be that simple. Despite the antibiotics, Sherlock's temperature remained stubbornly high, and his white cell count and CRP continued to climb. They were missing something, John knew it, but he just couldn't work out what it was.

Sherlock was being examined clinically twice a day, his charts analysed, his chest auscultated, his abdomen palpated, and still nobody seemed any the wiser. They had grown staph in his blood cultures too, and his antibiotics had been changed to those with appropriate sensitivities. It was being chalked up to a resistant sepsis, but John wasn't convinced. And every day, Sherlock grew a little weaker, and his renal function deteriorated a bit more until dialysis was beginning to look inevitable.

He was going to die, John knew it, but he was damned if he was going to let him go without a fight.

Sherlock knew people all over London, people who knew everything. What would Sherlock do, if he had somebody who was dying and he didn't know why?

He would call John. And if John couldn't or wouldn't help, he would call - Molly. Molly the pathologist, Molly who knew about death and what caused it, but more to the point who knew about diseases and pathological processes and how to think backwards to find the causative organism from the end result. Molly who might just be the only person who could save Sherlock.

'I could look at the central line?' She had suggested when John phoned her. 'See if I can get any other information from that? It's a few days down the line now, but I'm happy to look at the cultures, see if there's anything that they missed?' And his blood results - I could look at those too. I'll let you know if I come up with anything.'

'That would be great,' John said. 'But I was hoping for a bit more of a hands-on approach.'

'Meaning?'

'I was hoping that you'd come and examine him.'

'I'm a pathologist, John. My kind of examination usually involves a sternal saw.'

John winced. 'I wasn't thinking of anything that extreme. But an external examination. You could do that couldn't you? See if you can find any clues.'

'If you think it would help, but why would I find things that the intensivists haven't?'

'Because you know how to look, Molly. No, you know how to _observe_ , as Sherlock would say.'

'How bad is he John, really?'

'He's bad, Molly. Honestly - I'm not sure he's going to pull through this one.'

'I'll be there in an hour,' she told him.

...

'So how do we do this?' Molly asked John.

'How do you normally do it?'

'Well, I normally start with the history, read the case file. I've already done that. Then I look at any results we've already got. Again, been through those. Then I expose the body and do a full external examination. Top to toe, front to back, look at every inch of skin, look in every crevice, every orifice, look under the finger nails, see what I can find.

'Then go for it,' John said, pulling the blind down over the door. 'Apart from the full exposure of course. I think we should do this in sections. Don't want him to get too chilly.'

'He's got a temperature of 38.5, John. Might do him good to cool down a bit.'

'Still,' John said. 'Preserving modesty and all that. Let's do it a bit at a time.'

They started at the top, Molly inspecting Sherlock's scalp, his ears, his nose, his mouth, as much as she could around the endotracheal tube and finally, removing the tape that held his eyelids closed to protect his corneas, his eyes.

'What are you expecting to find?' John asked fascinated.

'Anything really; Arcus; Kaiser-Fleischer rings, or - Oh My,' she murmured.

'What?' John asked.

'Look!' Molly said, flashing the pen torch at the corner of Sherlock's right eye as she held the lid open.

'There's - a red dot?' John asked. 'Could be anything.'

'Apart from it isn't anything. It's a conjunctival petechiae. And there's another one there - look!'

'Meaning?'

'Could be nothing. He's been ventilated, his platelets dropped for a while. Depends if there are more of them. Hand me that opthalmoscope will you?'

John did as he was asked, and Molly after examining the back of Sherlock's eye for several minutes, muttering to herself.'

'What is it?'

'He's got retinal haemorrhages. Lots of them, and - yes! That one's definitely got a pale centre. They're Roth's spots.'

'What?'

'Did you sleep through your pathology lectures at medical school, John? Roth's spots.

'Still not ringing any bells. Humour me.'

'Roth's spots. Retinal haemorrhages with pale centres, due to micro-infarctions. So - conjunctival petechiae, and Roth's spots. Let's see if there are any more.'

Molly examined every inch of Sherlock's skin. She found another cluster of petechiae on the sole of his left foot, and a small red nodule on the palm of his right hand over the thenar eminence, at the base of the thumb.

'I give up,' John said. 'What is it?'

'Oh come on John, call yourself a physician?'

'No, I call myself a surgeon, and occasionally a GP.'

'It's a Janeway lesion, John. Has he had an echo?'

'A few days ago, after he threw the emboli. They were looking for signs of right heart failure.'

'And they didn't see anything else unusual?'

'Not that they mentioned.'

'Then he needs a trans-oesophageal one. Hand me that stethoscope.' John did as he was asked, and watched as Molly listened to Sherlock's heart. After a few minutes of listening in various places, she grimaced and handed the stethoscope to John. 'To be honest, I'm not sure I'd hear a murmur if one was there,' she confessed. 'I'm out of practice. My patients don't tend to have heart sounds. If they do, then I get worried,'

John grinned at her, despite the situation. 'Call yourself a doctor, Molly?' he teased, extracting a little revenge for her earlier comments.

He started in the mitral area, as he had been taught, listening with both the bell and the diaphragm at the outer edge of Sherlock's healing left-sided scar, careful not to disturb the wound. First heart sound, second heart sound, no added sounds, no 'absence of silence'. It all sounded normal. Then he moved across, to the lower left sternal edge. First heart sound, second heart sounds, but then there was something else. A whoosh where the first heart sound should finish. A flow murmur from his fever, or the sound of a leaking valve? John couldn't be sure. He listened further up the chest wall - aortic area, pulmonary area, and in both he could hear the soft whoosh of blood flowing where it shouldn't.

'Listen to this,' he said, keeping the stethoscope on Sherlock's chest, and holding the ear-pieces out for Molly.

She listened, closing her eyes to focus on the sound, then removed the stethoscope from her ears and nodded at John. 'There's a murmur. Hard to tell where it's coming from with the noise of the ventilator, but there's definitely something there.'

'Why wouldn't they have picked it up?'

'We're old-school John; well, you're older-school than me, but we learnt clinical skills the hard way. Nowadays it's just whack on the bedside ultrasound and have a look. And they probably weren't looking at flow through valves. Even if they did see a bit if regurgitation, they'd likely chalk it up to a bit of pulmonary hypertension from the infection and congestion.'

'So fever and a new murmur, he's got endocarditis?'

Molly nodded again. 'With septic emboli to the lungs, because it's right sided, and very few peripheral emboli because they have to get all the way through the lungs first.'

'Molly, I could kiss you,' John said, giving her a hug instead, and kissing her on the cheek as a compromise.

Then he frowned. 'But why would he get endocarditis now? It's ages since he last used - must be two weeks at least.'

'It could have been floating around for that long. It's often insidious, remember? Or it could have started in here. The valve is damaged by the turbulent flow from the contaminants in the drugs - usually, it's the baking powder, or whatever they cut it with that does that damage. It's effectively like having a graze on your knee, but instead, it's on your valve, and the damage to the endothelium allows bacteria to settle and Bob's your Uncle, you've got endocarditis and you throw off clusters of bacteria to your lungs and that makes you -' she paused and stared at Sherlock as if seeing him for the first time, 'really, really sick,' she murmured.

'Get him a trans-oesophageal echo, John,' she said. 'As fast as you can. If it's not responding to antibiotics, he might need surgery to remove the valve. People can function quite well without the tricuspid, so they'd be better off taking it out entirely if it comes to it.'

'How do you know that?' John asked.

'Didn't I tell you? I wanted to be a cardio-thoracic surgeon for a while. Turned out I didn't have the temperament for it, but it's amazing what you pick up.'

'Anything else we should be thinking of?' John asked.

'Something you won't like,' Molly said.

'Go on.'

'That central line,' she said. 'I checked the lab results. They grew all kind of odd things from it, that they assumed were contaminants. Organisms that you just wouldn't find on an intensive care unit.'

Like what?'

'Mould spores for a start.'

'So?'

'So did he still have his central line in when he did his little bunk last week?'

'Yes.'

'I may be wrong, but I'd say that line was used somewhere damp, an old building in all probability.'

'What are you saying, Molly?'

'I'm saying that I think he shot up into his central line when he went AWOL. I think that's why he's got endocarditis and that's why they can't identify the bug. I think he's got a fungal infection on his heart valve.'

'They grew staphylococcus aureus,' John said,

'Which is a common skin commensal. Did they grow it in the cultures?'

'In two sets. The others have all come back as negative.'

'So either the staph is a contaminant, or he's got more than one organism on that valve.'

'So how do we find out what it is? They've done cultures every day Molly, he must have had ten sets by now. They've all come back negative apart from the two that grew staph.'

'Which would fit with fungal infection too. We need to get clever.'

'How?'

'We need to get a sample of whatever's causing this. I brought some kit with me.' Molly produced a carrier bag and emptied its contents onto the silver equipment trolley in the corner of the room.

'What is that?' John asked.

'Punch biopsy kit,' Molly told him. 'We're going to take samples of whatever is causing the infection from the site of the peripheral emboli?'

'Meaning?'

'The petechiae in his foot and the lesion on his hand. They're both caused by bits of vegetation breaking off the valve and shooting down to the peripheral circulation until they get wedged in arterioles. They should be teaming with whatever organism causes this. If I take a sample from them and get it back to the lab fast, I should be able to grow it, or identify it with PCR. The sooner we know what the organism is, the sooner we can get him on the right treatment.'

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You didn't really think it was going to be that simple did you?? This is Sherlock we're talking about, after all.
> 
> With thanks to my fabulous beta team of 7percentsolution and j_baillier.


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Authors note:
> 
> I'm hoping that I don't manage to blind you all with medical science in this chapter and that the story will carry the technical details through! There are some explanatory notes at the end, but as ever if there's anything else you want explained then please let me know.
> 
> Hope it was worth the wait!
> 
> This chapter was expertly beta'd by the amazing team of J_Baillier and 7percentsolution

  
James MacPherson listened to what John had to say and offered to do the transoesophageal echocardiogram himself that afternoon. John didn't know whether to be relieved or horrified when he saw the vegetation on Sherlock's tricuspid valve appear on the screen. Molly had been right and they had found the cause. The flow through the valve itself was disrupted, the valve leaflets failing to close properly when the right ventricle contracted, resulting in a torrent of blood flowing back into the right atrium as the ventricle contracted rather than all of the blood being forced into the pulmonary artery and through the lungs, as it would with a competent valve. That regurgitation of blood with each cardiac contraction had caused the murmur that John had heard when he had listened to Sherlock's heart.

John had relayed Molly's theory about the possibility of a fungal infection in addition to the presumed bacterial one and following the echo results, James had written Sherlock up for amphotericin B, a powerful anti-fungal drug which was the treatment of choice for fungal endocarditis.

'So what now, does he need surgery? Will that fix it?' John asked.

'I'll get my cardiology colleagues to come and see him,' James Macpherson said, 'but I'd keep surgery as a last resort.'

'But Molly said he could do without the valve. Surely you'd be better to remove the source of infection? It doesn't look as if it's doing him much good with that degree of regurgitation anyway.'

''It's major cardiac surgery, John. I'm not sure that we could get him through it. His kidneys are hovering on the edge of failing as it is, and a period on bypass could just push them over the edge,'

'Then haemofilter him first,' John said, referring to the use of a machine to effectively replace the function of the kidneys.

But James Macpherson shook his head. 'That's not the only issue. The bottom line is, I'm not sure that any of him could withstand further surgery at the moment. I don't think we'd get his heart restarted after bypass. If he goes into overt cardiac failure then we won't have a choice, but his chances of surviving surgery would be slim.'

It was a stark, honest reply. If they tried surgery, then Sherlock would probably die. If they didn't try surgery, then he might well die anyway. John sank onto the chair next to the bed, head in hands.

'I'm sorry, John,' James MacPherson said, placing a hand on John's shoulder. 'He still has a chance, but it's getting slimmer by the day. Antifungals and a switch in antibiotics are our best hope now. Is there anyone I can call for you? Your wife?'

John shook his head. 'Things with Mary - they're not so good at the moment. I'll call Mycroft in a moment, he'll want to come and see him.'

What he couldn't say to James was that Mary was the last person that he wanted to see. He had compartmentalised this, as he always did in difficult situations, and Mary and his relationship with her, Mary and the child that she was carrying, they were objects from another existence that he could not contemplate until this was over. His world at this point in time was Sherlock, and this unit, and doing whatever it took to keep him alive, even if that possibility was looking less likely by the day.

'How about somebody to support you?' James was asking. 'You've been here day and night since he was re-admitted.'

John shook his head again, 'I'll be fine. I just want to be here for Sherlock.'

What was it that Sherlock used to say? ' _Alone protects me_?' John was finally starting to understand what he meant. If he had to discuss this with anyone at the moment, if anyone asked him how he felt, then all of his resolve, all of his strength would fall away, and he couldn't risk that. The nurses were kind, but efficient and business-like. They were there to care for Sherlock, for the many pumps and machine keeping him alive, turning one down and another one up, suctioning the numerous tubes, turning him and washing him, writing down line upon line of figures, taking samples from his arterial line and his central line, changing over bags of fluid and syringes of medication. They were courteous to John, and would occasionally suggest that he go off and get a coffee to enable them to perform more intimate procedures, or the night staff might suggest that he go and get some sleep, but it was clear that Sherlock was their patient and not John. Their conversation with him was polite, but if he didn't want to talk then they were happy to allow him to sit in silence, where those who knew him better might well not have been.

Alone, he could push emotion out of his mind and concentrate on the patient before him, on using all of his will to keep Sherlock alive. Magical thinking. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew how illogical it was, but concentrating on that was far preferable to contemplating all of the other issues outside this room that he would have to address when this was all over. 'When Sherlock is better' he told himself firmly, because the alternative was simply too horrible to contemplate.

...

The amphotericin was started within an hour of the echo to treat the presumed fungal infection. All that John could do now was to hope and pray that it would work.

Of Mycroft there was no sign. Anthea told John that he was abroad, on business, and could not be contacted. John knew exactly what that meant; he was doing something so classified that not even a dying sibling would be reason enough to extract him. Before his departure on his trip, Mycroft had left strict instructions with Anthea that Sherlock's parents were not to be contacted either, except in the event of his death. It turned out that Sherlock had left a living will filed with his solicitor which said the same thing. He didn't want his parents at his sick bed, or even at his death bed. So no Mycroft, and no Mr and Mrs Holmes. John was in this on his own.

For the next few days, things looked grim. Sherlock's renal function deteriorated on the amphotericin and they started haemodialysis, using a machine to continuously filter his blood, taking over the function of his failing kidneys. Despite the treatment, Sherlock's lungs started to fill up with fluid, and frothy pink sputum was coming up from the endotracheal tube, a sign of worsening right sided heart failure. A frusemide infusion was started to try to drive off the excess fluid, together with levosimendan to attempt to improve his cardiac function. Much to John's dismay, the cardiologists agreed with James MacPherson's reluctance to operate, and were even more emphatic. Whatever happened, surgery wasn't an option, not during the acute phase of his illness anyway. For now, it was antibiotics and antifungals or nothing.

John was counting the organs that were failing: failing lungs, their function replaced by the ventilator; failing kidneys replaced by the haemofiltration machine; failing heart supported by the inotropes being pumped into Sherlock via the central line; even his liver was gradually giving up the ghost as it was slowly poisoned by the amphotericin. Three organ failure, with an option on a fourth. What was the survival rate from that? John decided that he would rather not consult Doctor Google on this one. Sometimes it was better not to know.

His phone had rung and beeped almost constantly for the first few days, or rather buzzed and then flashed up with missed calls as he had turned it to silent. Mary had taken to phoning every hour on the hour, but he had found it surprisingly easy to ignore her calls. At some point, tired of jumping every time somebody walked into the room, convinced that it would be here and unwilling to face a discussion with her, he had texted her. Asking her to stay away; telling her that Sherlock was critically ill, and that all that he could think about at the moment was that, and that until he knew if he would live or die, he could not even contemplate anything else. Compartmentalising. A skill learnt from years of working as a doctor, when no matter what the arguments or the heartbreak outside the doors of the hospital, you learnt to switch off that area of your brain where you walked through the doors of the hospital, to put your 'real' life outside those walls aside, because your patients wanted their doctors to be human, but not too human. The only tragedy within those walls could be theirs. And now it was Sherlock's, and perhaps John's.

Mary, to her credit, stayed away, although John's phone still buzzed almost constantly. Eventually, the battery ran out and he felt no urge to rush to charge it. His iPad enabled him to do the constant trawling though the internet to look for new drugs, new treatments, new ideas, anything that might save Sherlock. He had even suggested a ballon pump at one point, to aid Sherlock's failing heart, but like all of his ideas, that had been met with a shake of the head and a calm explanation by James MacPherson and the intensivists that Sherlock's failure was all right-sided, and a balloon pump would be unlikely to help where the inotropes couldn't.

Being a relative was hard, but being a medical one was doubly so. The sense of uselessness was immense, and the hours stretched long beyond the number that it should be possible to have in a single day. John sat, holding Sherlock's hand, talking to him in the vain hope that he could hear him. Talking to him about something, anything to keep him fighting. Lestrade visited a couple of times, both briefly, obviously uncomfortable in the strange environment of ITU, unable to find a way to talk to a Sherlock so utterly silent and compliant, and he had made his excuses and left within ten minutes on both occasions.

Molly's cultures came back as negative initially, but she told John that fungi could take up to four weeks to grow. In the meantime she was still waiting for the results from the PCR test, which she hoped would identify the organism. She had other less clinically relevant results for John, however, when she came to visit the following evening. 'I did some more tests on the central line,' she told him. 'There were traces of ketamine on it.'

'That's an anaesthetic drug though. They could have used that here.'

'I checked his records, they didn't. I'm sorry, John.'

John hesitated, weighing up the implications of what she was saying; remembering the mould spores that she had found in the line, and her theory about where they had come from. 'So what, you think that he administered it himself? Before Leinster Gardens?' he asked.

'I found traces of ketamine under his fingernails as well. I think that's exactly what he did,' Molly said. 'The line also tested positive for diamorphine, and what looks like citric acid, as well as the morphine and fentanyl that he was given here.'

John remembered the paramedic struggling to find a vein to cannulate after Sherlock's collapse in 221b. Remembered looking himself and finding them all thrombosed, and then his jubilation at realising that the central line was still in place. The temptation for Sherlock, desperate for something to numb the pain of his injuries must have been irresistible.

But had Sherlock - careful, meticulous, Sherlock Holmes, really injected a syringe full of potentially infected drugs into a central line going almost directly to his heart? Surely he wouldn't have been that reckless?

And then John thought of 221b, of the chemicals left all over the kitchen table and the eyeballs and severed fingers kept in the fridge. Of course he would. He wouldn't see the danger of infection: he would only see the problems of being in pain, the craving to get high, and the solution - the rapid access to his own vascular system, unrestrained by thrombosed veins and shaking hands. Of course he had used the central line. It had been the logical solution. And Sherlock Holmes would always bow to logic above all else.

John groaned, wondering how deep into this thing Sherlock was. Because if he had been desperate enough to inject into his central line, then that spoke into a deep and entrenched addiction that not even a prolonged period of time in hospital was going to address. It might prevent him from using, might solve his physiological and pharmacological addiction, but the psychology of his addiction would remain unchanged. John was going to have to get him to accept psychological help. How, he had absolutely no idea. He looked over at Sherlock as he lay motionless on the white hospital sheets. The only sounds in the room were the sibilant wheeze of the ventilator, the hum of the haemodialysis machine, and the odd puff of air from the self-inflating bed that had become John's constant soundtrack over the last few days.

Sherlock was attached to a seemingly endless number of tubes and wires, monitoring him and keeping him alive: central line, peripheral line, arterial line, endotracheal tube, nasogastric tube, urinary catheter, dialysis catheter, ECG monitoring leads. John could count eight different substances currently being poured or dripped into his body, the most recent the bag of red cells that had been put up to correct his resistant anaemia - a product both of the constant trickle of blood into his chest drain which showed no sign of abating, now that his clotting was deranged by the sepsis, the effects of the amphotericin, and the multiple blood tests that were being taken every day. John wondered how many units of blood he'd had since his illness - more than twenty, less than thirty he would guess. And not just red cells but all the other components too - platelets and plasma and even additional clotting factors. So if all of Sherlock's own blood had been replaced not once but many times, was there anything left that was still his own, and if so how much of him was still Sherlock and how much was a stranger?

John mentally shook himself, and reached for Sherlock's hand. Of course he was still Sherlock, what was he thinking? He was tired, that was all, the long nights with little sleep taking their toll. Would it be like this when the baby arrived, he wondered? Wandering around in a sleep-deprived fug, unknowing and uncaring what day it was, walking into furniture, so tired that he could barely string a sentence together? Would he even be living in the same house as his child when they were born? He pushed that thought firmly to the back of his head. Not now, he couldn't think about this now. This sleep-deprivation felt like the seventy-two hour on calls that he used to do as a surgical house officer, back in the bad old days, when nobody had even heard of the European Working Time Directive. No guaranteed sleep, and so tired that he had regularly lost the ability to talk at 3am, and on one occasion had stuck the syringe from the arterial blood gas syringe into his own finger instead of the patients wrist, and had failed to notice for several seconds, so numb from sleep-deprivation that he had felt no pain.

John's world had narrowed to Sherlock's room, the relative's room on the ITU, where the nurses had taken to feeding him sandwiches and cups of coffee while Sherlock was being washed or having procedures done, and the on-call room that James MacPherson had procured for him to sleep in when he could be persuaded to leave Sherlock's side.

He had tried to go back there to sleep, usually in the early hours of the morning, when the nurse stationed constantly in Sherlock's room caught him dozing in the chair, lulled by the symphony of sounds, and chased him out of the unit. But the sleep that had been so irresistible in the warm cocoon of the intensive care unit had proved strangely elusive in the barren on-call room. After what felt like several hours of lying there, willing sleep to come, he would fall into an uneasy dose, disturbed by dreams of Sherlock dying in front of his eyes, and being unable to reach him to help, separated by a partition of glass that refused to let him through, no matter how much he kicked or punched at it. He would watch the bullet enter Sherlock's chest again, and again, watch blood bloom on the white of his shirt, watch him fall backwards to the ground as if in slow motion, watch him gasp for breath as the pool of blood beneath him spread, and in all of them, John was entirely powerless, unable to reach him, unable to prevent the inevitable.

He rarely managed to sleep for more than a few hours before waking, heart racing, drenched in sweat, convinced that his dreams were a portent of what was to come. He would shower quickly, change his clothes, and return to the unit before the night shift had even begun to do their tally of inputs and outputs on the chart to prepare for the morning handover, and spend the remainder of the night dozing in the chair. He had an illogical fear of leaving Sherlock alone, as if by staying with him he could somehow give him the strength to ensure that he didn't give up. And underlying it all was always the knowledge that if something happened to Sherlock when he wasn't there, if he died alone, surrounded only by strangers, then John knew that he would never be able to forgive himself.

After three days of this vigil, John knew that he looked nearly as bad as he felt. Sherlock was hanging on but only barely. Transient improvements; an improvement in his blood pressure, a weaning down of the inotropes, would be followed as surely as night followed day by a deterioration in something else; a requirement for increased ventilator pressures or a drop in his platelets. John's days seemed filled with short-lived hope, followed by stabs of disappointment and despair. And through it all he sat there, holding Sherlock's hand, talking to him about something, anything; about the cases that they had solved together; about his ridiculous theories about what Sherlock had got up to in his time away; about exactly what he would do to all of his precious equipment in Baker Street if Sherlock didn't wake up and stop him giving it to the local high school to be destroyed by twelve year olds. But eventually, all of his conversations would disintegrate into him dropping his head onto the bed next to Sherlock, and whispering, 'Don't die, Sherlock, please don't die. Not again, I couldn't bear it. Come back to me.'

What he felt in those moments, he found hard to put into words. Love didn't begin to describe it as he watched Sherlock's sleeping face, the dark lashes curling on the pale cheeks, the exaggerated cupid's bow of his top lip, the slow rise and fall of his chest as it was inflated by the ventilator. What John felt for Sherlock in those dark hours before the dawn was like nothing he had ever experienced before; it was an utter immersion of himself in another person, a knowledge that somehow they were one entity, and that if Sherlock died, then what was left of John would be nothing more than a hollow shell. Mary was lost to him, not just because she had lied to him, nor because she was not the person that he had thought that he had married, but because she had knowingly tried to destroy the only thing in the world that John cared about more than her. And despite Sherlock's claims that it had been surgery, despite Mary's protests that she had miscalculated, John knew that he would never be able to forgive her for how close she had come to killing Sherlock, or the fact that she still might have succeeded in this.

If Sherlock died, then he would never be able to look at Mary again without remembering it.

If Sherlock survived, then he might never want to.

The guilt that he felt was overwhelming. Sherlock was lying there in a hospital bed, with tubes coming out of every orifice, hovering between life and death because of him. If John had never met Mary, then Sherlock would never have been shot. The facts were irrefutable.

And yet, and yet. Sherlock had risked his life for a second time to tell John that he could trust Mary. Why? Why was it so important to him? Try as he might, John could find no possible deduction that could explain the strange workings of Sherlock Holmes' mind. He would just have to hope that he could explain it himself when he woke up. If he woke up.

...

'No change?' Molly asked, walking into the room on the third day of the new antibiotic and antifungal regime.

'One step forward, one step back. His liver function is a bit worse, but his cardiac function is a bit better. Everything else is pretty much the same. And every day that he's like this, he gets a bit weaker,' John said, looking at Sherlock's sleeping face.

'He's a fighter. He's got through tougher scrapes than this before. He'll get through this one,' Molly said, determinedly.

'I wish I had your optimism, Molly,' John said.

'You look exhausted, John. Why don't you go and get some sleep? Or if you can't sleep then at least have a break, have a hot meal and a shower, maybe even get outside the hospital for a while. I'll stay with him while you're gone, and I promise I'll call you if anything changes.'

John shook his head, and started to protest, but Molly stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, 'You need to look after yourself too,' she said. 'When he wakes up then the real fun will start, and he will wake up, I know it. Look, I'm not working tomorrow. I can stay with him as long as I need to, all night if that's what it takes. Go and get some rest. Even if it's just for a few hours.'

John nodded, not trusting himself to speak, uncharacteristically moved by Molly's concern, and he surrendered his chair by the bed to her and headed towards the door for the unit.

He was halfway out of the door before he remembered that his phone battery was dead. The ITU staff lent him a spare bleep, its weight familiar in his pocket from his house officer days. He headed back to the on-call room, plugged his phone in to charge, had a shower and changed into some of his rapidly diminishing pile of clean clothes. He'd be into scrubs in a couple of days if he didn't go home to replenish his supplies. Knowing that he wouldn't be able to sleep, he instead went to the canteen to get some food, and then remembering Molly's advice, headed out of the main entrance of the hospital for a coffee shop round the corner, picking a stool in the window to sit and nurse his cappuccino, remembering with a smile Sherlock's derision of any form of coffee fancier than an americano. Double expresso had always been his poison, with as much sugar as he could dissolve it. Maximum caffeine and sugar hit with minimal time wasted on drinking it. Logical to the core, even when it came to beverages.

John picked up a newspaper that somebody had left on the table in front of him, only to be confronted by Magnussen's grinning face, and the news that he had acquired yet another tabloid. If John hated Mary at that moment, then he hated Magnussen a hundred times more. He almost wished that Mary had completed the job that she had gone to Magnussen's office to do; that she had killed the man. If she had done that, and not shot Sherlock, if he had discovered her secret after the event, what would he have done then? Could he have forgiven her for killing a man, for killing many men, for lying to him, if in doing so she had not come so close to killing Sherlock Holmes? The uncomfortable truth was that he suspected that he might well have done. For hadn't John done the same thing? John had killed more than one human being during his years in the Royal Army Medical Corps. All in self-defence, or the defence of his comrades. And once, just once, since his discharge from the army, he had killed a man to save the life of Sherlock Holmes, and he had never told Mary about that, either. She wasn't the only one with secrets. She wasn't the only assassin in the family.

And their child, what of him or her? What sort of life could this tiny bundle of cells have with parents like this?

John shook his head subconsciously, as if by doing so he could clear the thoughts from it. This was the problem with taking time out, with having time to think. Harder to push the messy tangle of impossible questions that his life had become to one side away from the protective bubble of the intensive care unit, away from Sherlock's side. All he knew at the moment was that he had to get Sherlock through this alive. He couldn't even begin to process how he felt about Mary and the baby and the layer upon layer of lies that she had told him until he knew that her bullet, and Sherlock's need to show him both her culpability and his forgiveness of it, had not cost Sherlock his life.

Pushing his cup of coffee to the side, he stood up, tucking the stool neatly back under the counter, the army training coming through as always. Then he picked up the newspaper and dropped it in the bin where it belonged as he headed back to the intensive care unit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explanatory Notes
> 
> 1) Haemofiltration is a renal replacement therapy used on intensive care in patients with kidney failure. It involves putting in a 'Vascath' into a large vein, usually the femoral vein. This is basically a large tube with two lumens, one to take the blood away from the body and the other to return it back again. The blood then enters a machine which contains a filter, allowing waste products and water to diffuse out of the blood, and this is then returned with replacement fluid back to the patient.
> 
> It is basically a way of replacing the function of failing kidneys. In unwell intensive care patients, continuous haemofiltration tends to be used rather than traditional dialysis which usually occurs over a few hours, as it causes less of a drop in blood pressure, and is therefore better tolerated.
> 
> 2) Magical thinking is a psychiatric / psychology term. Initial purest form it is the belief that thoughts or wishes can s affect external events, but it is also used to refer to the beliefs that seemingly unrelated events can influence outcomes, or have significance in a way that isn't possible, so for example, 'If the next car that comes round that corner is a red one then it means I should split up with my partner' etc.
> 
> It is a feature of some personality disorders, but is also seen in 'normal' people, at times of extreme stress. John would recognise it for what it was, but it is a way of trying to re-exert control in uncontrolled circumstances, so he'd probably just go with it.
> 
> 3) Frusemide is a diuretic (i.e. it makes the patient pass more urine) used in heart failure, because the failure in the pump action of the heart makes patients retain fluid, hence fluid ends up in places that it shouldn't do, like the lungs (causing the pink sputum), the limbs and even the abdominal cavity.
> 
> 4) Levosimendan is a very clever drug that helps the failing heart pump faster by sensitising calcium channels. Or something like that. J_Baillier would be able to explain it much better than me, but then she's a clever doctor.
> 
> 5) Doctor Google - this is a very real thing! If you're stuck with a patient then you consult your colleagues Doctor Google or Doctor Wiki, often while trying really hard not to let the patient see what you are doing from the other side of the desk.
> 
> John is deliberately avoiding what he already knows - your chances of mortality goes up with each additional organ that fails. One study suggests its about 52% with three organ failure, going up to 88% with four organ failure. But then the mortality from fungal endocarditis is pretty high too. If I was John I wouldn't want to look at the statistics either.
> 
> 6) PCR (Polymerase chain reaction) is a way of copying a short piece of DNA many billions of time, enabling the identification of viruses (or bacteria or DNA from crime scenes) from tiny pieces of genetic information. In this case, Molly is using it to identify the fungus that they presume is causing Sherlock's infection, but which is present in too small amounts to identify by traditional methods.
> 
> 7) Citric acid - heroin is often cut with this to help it dissolve when heated. Finding citric acid under Sherlock's finger nails together with diamorphine (the pharmacological name for heroin) is therefore a strong indicator that he has been injecting it.


	29. Chapter 29

John returned to the unit to find Molly sitting in the chair by the bed, staring at Sherlock's face as he slept, as if trying to work out the answer to some very complex puzzle.

'Everything okay?' John asked quietly as he walked in, after nodding hello to Sherlock's nurse for the night shift, a silent presence at the desk in the corner of the room.

'What do you think he dreams about?' Molly asked, without looking at John. 'Or does he? I don't know - do sedated patients dream do you think?'

'We know that they do,' John said, after a quick check of the numbers on Sherlock's charts, making sure that nothing had changed in his time away. 'Propofol in particular gives people very vivid dreams, I don't know about midazolam. The alfentanil is probably fairly trippy though.'

'Do you think he's dreaming about solving cases, and will be really pissed off when he wakes up and realises that it was all just in his head? That he hasn't solved them at all?'

'I think that he'd just be pleased that he'd worked them out,' John said, pulling up a chair next to Molly and joining her in her contemplation of Sherlock. 'It's never about the actual case for him, you know. That's why he doesn't really care if it's a case from yesterday or one from a hundred years ago. It's all about working it out, the deductive process, working out who and where and why and how. That's all he cares about. The justice is just the cherry on the cake.'

'He does like catching the bad guy though,' Molly said. 'I always thought that was important to him. Restoring some kind of balance to things.

'Sometimes,' John said. Feeling as if this was sailing perilously close to the wind, but being unable to stop himself from speaking the truth. 'But sometimes he lets them go, too.'

Molly turned to look at him, frowning slightly, 'Why would he do that?'

'Because sometimes he can see the bigger picture, even if we can't,' John said, reaching over and squeezing Sherlock's hand.

'He'd do anything for you, John, you know that don't you?' Molly said quickly, as if wanting to get the words out before she could stop herself.

'I think that I've finally worked that out,' John said, glancing up at the cardiac monitor above the bed which was registering the odd ectopic beat. It was nothing to worry about, he knew, but it was an excuse to avoid eye contact with Molly.

'The only thing he won't ever do, is say what he wants for himself,' Molly said.

'He does that all the time,' John said, surprised, thinking of the number of times Sherlock had interrupted him at work, or in the middle of dinner with Mary, or at any other number of in-opportune times to tell John that his presence was urgently required for a case.

'Not for himself,' Molly said quietly. 'He does it for the work, but never for himself.'

'What's that meant to mean?'

'He missed you, John. More than he would ever care to admit.'

'I know,' John said, staring at Sherlock's face, examining every line, every mark on it as if to etch it on his memory. When Sherlock was better, when he was awake, would he ever get the chance to spend so much time looking at him like this? And why did the thought that he might not make him feel so inexplicably bereft?

'As long as you do,' Molly said, then she stood up, and picked up her coat from the back of the chair. 'Do you want me to come back tomorrow? Give you a chance to have another break?'

John started to refuse and then stopped himself. 'Would you?' he asked. 'That would be great.'

And Molly just nodded quickly, but with one of those smiles that lit up her whole face, showing how pleased she was that John was allowing her to help.

'I'll see you tomorrow, then,' she said, as she let herself out of the door.

......

The night passed peacefully, with no major dramas, and John dozed comfortably enough in the reclining chair that the nurses had found for him. By the following afternoon, things slowly but irrevocably had begun to take a turn for the better. Sherlock's oxygen requirements began to decrease, and he was needing less ventilatory support to push the fluid out of his lungs. His cardiac function, which had been gradually deteriorating, started to slowly improve. John hardly dared to hope, scared of the well-known Lazarus phenomena, or rather the reverse Lazarus phenomena, where patients got better and then turned up their toes and died just when their relatives are sure that the worst was over. But as time went on it became more and more obvious that Sherlock Holmes had no intention of dying. It looked very much as if, against all the odds, he was going to live.

And Molly came up trumps too, bounding into the room just after six in the evening, waving a piece of paper at John.

'Histoplasmosis!' she told him excitedly, as if she was announcing the winning lottery results. 'The PCR results from the lesion on his hand came back and I was right - it is fungal; it's histoplasmosis!'

'What's that when it's at home,' John asked.

'Histoplasmosis capsulatum,' Molly told him. 'It's a non-capsulated, bimorphic fungus, found mainly in the American mid-west, often in soil contaminated by bats' droppings.'

'How the hell did he get that?' John asked. 

'Goodness only knows,' Molly said. 'It's mainly a disease of cavers and spelunkers. There hasn't been a case reported in the UK for over fifty years.'

'Trust Sherlock,' John said. 'He would get something bizarre. He couldn't just get a bog standard staph infection like everyone else.'

'But the good news is it's treatable with amphotericin, and it's the only fungal cause of endocarditis that doesn't always require surgery.'

'I'll take any good news I can get at the moment, ' John said with a grin.

By the following day, Sherlock's white cell count was slowly creeping down, and his CRP had levelled off, a good indication that the infection was finally responding to the treatment. Better still, his kidneys were showing the first sign of recovering from the triple insult of two prolonged periods of low blood pressure within a week, repeated surgery and powerful kidney- poisoning anti-fungals. John knew they were improving because the catheter bag was starting to fill up with urine, where previously it had been almost empty. He had never thought he would be so glad to see somebody pee.

By the sixth day after they had made the diagnosis, they were talking about a sedation-hold, and seeing if Sherlock could manage off the ventilator.

It was a long, slow process. Turn down the sedation, switch the ventilator to demand to see if he would start to trigger it himself. At first there was no response, then Sherlock took a breath on his own, then another.

John reached for his hand. 'That's it,' he told him. 'Just like that, keep doing that and you'll be home before you know it.'

After a couple of hours the signs were looking good. Sherlock was breathing for himself, and the arterial blood sample taken from his arterial line showed that he was breathing effectively. The sedation was switched off entirely, and it was John who then was asked to perform the acid-test for extubation - to see if Sherlock would wake up and obey commands. In short, to see if his brain was functioning normally after all that it had been subject to over the last week or so.

If John could get Sherlock to wake up and respond to him, then the tube could come out. If he couldn't then they would have to re-sedate him and try again at a later date. Within a few minutes of the sedation being turned off, Sherlock began coughing on the endotracheal tube.

‘Sherlock,’ John said, feeling like an idiot, aware of the audience of the ITU nurse and the registrar, who was standing, syringe in hand, watching him and watching Sherlock’s reaction to him, ready to pull out the tube if the signs were good. ‘Time to wake up. Can you open your eyes for me?’

Sherlock shifted on the bed, coughed and then gagged on the tube.

‘I know,’ John murmured. ‘If you stop being such an awkward bastard and just open your eyes, then we could get that out.’

Sherlock coughed again, then opened his eyes and stared at John, blinking repeatedly as he tried to focus.

'Thank fuck for that,' John breathed. 'Welcome back.'

Sherlock’s hand came up and tried to push the tube away from his mouth.

‘One thing at a time,’ John told him, grabbing his hand and holding it tight. ‘Squeeze my hand and we can take it out.’

Sherlock did as he was asked, squeezing John’s hand tight, and then releasing it, his eyes fixed on John, silently asking him to remove the tube.

‘Happy?’ John asked, looking up at the registrar who had one last look at the monitor to ensure that Sherlock's oxygen saturations were still at an acceptable level.

She nodded, ‘Happy,’ she agreed. ‘Sherlock, I need you to breathe out when I tell you, and we’ll get that tube out.’

Sherlock did as he was asked, cooperating for possibly the first time in his life, John thought with amusement, as the tube was removed and replaced with a tight-fitting CPAP mask. The numbers looked good, but the effort seemed to have exhausted him and he quickly drifted back into sleep, without any further attempt at communicating with John.

They watched him closely over the next few hours. Sherlock remained asleep, but his oxygen saturations were stable, and the repeated arterial blood samples that were taken all indicated that he was breathing effectively on his own.

That night, John felt safe enough to leave Sherlock's bedside for more than a few hours for the first time in nearly a week, although he was not yet confident enough to leave the hospital entirely. He fell into the bed in his room in the hospital accommodation and slept for twelve hours straight.

 

..............

 

Recovery was frustratingly slow. All of Sherlock's numbers were improving. The CPAP was weaned down over the course of the following day and eventually switched to a low trickle of oxygen through nasal prongs. Sherlock's lungs had become less congested, although the infection in his lungs was proving slower to resolve. He was off the inotropes and his kidneys had recovered enough to stop the haemo-filtration. After that it became a game of watch and wait. The antibiotics and anti-fungals needed to be continued for a good six weeks, but the chest drain would be coming out in a few days, now that the flow of fluid out of his chest had slowed to a trickle.

But Sherlock himself remained drowsy and uncommunicative. He would open his eyes, stare at John, occasionally squeeze his hand, and then drift back into sleep. John was starting to worry about the state of his brain. While rare from right sided infection, emboli from endocarditis could affect the brain, causing small micro-infarcts, tiny strokes, or the period of low blood pressure could have caused brain damage. A CT scan done the morning after his extubation looked remarkably normal, which was reassuring. The intensivists were optimistic, blaming the prolonged period of ventilation and so called 'ITU syndrome', the phenomena where patients become confused and disorientated simply due to the severity of their illness and the strange environment that was the intensive care unit. Sherlock was still on massive doses of opiates to control his pain, and this was also thought to have a role. John wanted to believe their explanations, but he couldn't shake his sense of unease as the hours ticked by and Sherlock failed to wake up fully.

In the end, it was Molly who got the first sense out of Sherlock, sitting with him that evening while John went to get dinner in the canteen.

She was sitting in the chair next to Sherlock's bed, chatting to him about her most recent case, in the hope that he would either wake up and tell her to shut up out of irritation, or be interested enough in the case to chip in and give him the answers. Instead, he woke up, stared at her and asked, 'Molly?' his voice croaky with disuse

'Hello,' Molly said.

'Am I dead?' he asked, squinting at her, his words whispered, difficult to make out.

'What? Oh no, you're alive, you're not in the mortuary. I just came to visit.'

'Where -'

'You're in intensive care. At the Royal London.'

'No, where's John?' Sherlock said clearly.

...

 

Alerted by a phone call from Molly, John came running up the stairs to the unit, having left his dinner half eaten on the table, to find Sherlock, eyes open, visually following his progress through the unit through the open door.

John flung himself into the room and wrapped his arms around him, pulling him into a hug.

'Ow!' Sherlock said, as John's arm snagged on his central line.

'Sorry,' John said, pulling away to inspect the damage and finding none. 'No, actually, I'm not sorry,' and he hugged Sherlock again, as Sherlock's spare arm came up to embrace him back.

'You okay?' he asked Sherlock, finally letting him go. 'No, I mean of course, you're not okay, I just mean -'

Sherlock gave him a look - the one that meant he thought John was being idiotic.

'What year did the Second World War start,' John asked,

'1939.'

'And who is the Prime Minister?'

'Why on earth would I want to know that?'

John grinned and hugged him again. 'Have you got any idea how ill you've been?' he asked him.

'Molly told me,' Sherlock said. 'What day is it?'

'Friday, October 15th.'

'How long -'

'Since you did your escape act and collapsed at Baker Street? Two weeks to the day.'

‘Magnussen…’

'No, Sherlock, absolutely not,' John shook his head. 'No more Magnussen, no more cases for a while. You nearly killed yourself. You're not going to be going anywhere for a long while.'

'It's important,' Sherlock said, frowning slightly as he struggled to focus on John, obviously exhausted just from the effort of talking.

'No, it's not. You're important, do you hear me? Christ, you injected fungus into your heart via your central line, did you know that? You nearly died. You managed to take our your lungs, your heart and your kidneys in one fell swoop. Your liver isn't looking too chipper either. It's a miracle that you're still here, so just shut up and behave yourself, will you?'

Sherlock stared at John, and John felt something he hadn't felt in a long time.

Molly obviously felt it too, because she muttered something about leaving them to it, and let herself out of the room.

Unwitnessed now, John sat on the edge of the bed, and cupped a hand behind Sherlock's neck, bringing his head down so that their foreheads were touching. 'I need you to get better, you hear me?' he murmured. 'I can't do that again. I thought I was going to lose you. I won't do that. I can't do that.'

'John?' Sherlock said, and the words were spoken gently. 

John pulled away and looked at him. 'What?' he asked.

'Mary?' There was regret in Sherlock's voice, as if he was seeking to return John to reality.

John kept his eyes locked with Sherlocks and shook his head. 'No, not Mary - you,' he said firmly.

'It's important.'

'Why? Why Sherlock? Why are you so intent on me staying with Mary?'

'Because I can't give you what you need,' Sherlock told him, the words spoken slowly and with effort, his eyes locked with John's.

'What the hell is that supposed to mean?' John stared at Sherlock, lying pale and weak against his pillows, and wondered why it was so hard to tell him how he felt.

'John, listen to me,' Sherlock reached out for John's hand and squeezed it hard, 'I am not what you think that I am. I can't -'

'I don't care, you idiot, don't you see? I don't care what you can or can't give me. I just need you to know that I -'

They both jumped at the knock on the door.

'Not interrupting anything am I?' Mary asked as she walked in. 'I just came to see how you were doing as John doesn't appear to be answering his phone anymore.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to J_Baillier for the expert med-picking and for talking me through the complex process of extubation. Who knew that it was so complicated??
> 
> And thanks to 7percentsolution for betaing and pointing out that Sherlock wouldn't know who the Prime Minister was...


	30. Chapter 30

John slid off the bed, feeling ridiculously guilty, his mind doing cartwheels.

Mary. Mary was here. And Sherlock had just - Christ what had he done? Admitted what he felt about John? Or had he?

Meanwhile, Sherlock appeared to be making polite conversation with Mary, who brushed past John as she leant over and kissed Sherlock on the cheek. He caught a whiff of her perfume. Clair de Lune, and the memory of it made him go cold as the consequences of that evening came flooding back to him.

'How are you?' Mary was asking Sherlock.

'Still alive. Thanks to John,' came his reply.

'Well, he's always happy to play the hero where you're concerned,' Mary said. 'You should always have your own army doctor on standby when you're planning a dramatic collapse.' She smiled at him, to show that she was teasing. 'I thought you'd be on a normal ward by now?'

'There were a few complications,' John told her, fighting the impulse to shout, ' _How can you do this? How can you just walk in and act as if you're his friend after everything that you've done? '_

'What complications?' Mary asked sharply, oblivious to John's internal turmoil.

John hesitated slightly, and looked over at Sherlock, who shook his head almost imperceptibly behind Mary's back. He looked tired, John registered, trying not to resent Mary for crashing into what was supposed to be their sanctuary from the outside world.

'Oh, you know - normal stuff,' he said lightly, trying to push his irritation to one side. 'Bit of a chest infection, kidneys took a knocking, that sort of thing, They thought he was better off staying here where he could be monitored more closely. You know what general wards are like.'

Sherlock gave him a half-smile of appreciation over Mary's head, and John felt a jolt of satisfaction for having read the situation correctly.

'But you're okay?' Mary asked Sherlock, genuine concern in her voice. 'I mean you're going to be okay?'

'I'm going to be fine,' Sherlock told her. 'Thanks to Doctor Watson here. Now why don't you take John for a cup of coffee, Mary, and let me get some rest?'

'Fantastic idea,' Mary said briskly, just as John was starting to protest. 'I'm glad that you're okay,' she told Sherlock, seriously. 'You had me worried for a while.'

And then she grabbed John's hand, and pulled him out of the unit, John silently cursing Sherlock Holmes, and wondering why it had taken only fifteen minutes of him being conscious before he had lost control of his life again.

.......

They headed for the canteen, bought two cups of dubious quality coffee, and found a table in a quiet corner.

'It's been over a week, John,' Mary said. 'You could at least have texted me with an update.'

'My phone battery was flat,' John said, fiddling with his coffee cup, refusing to make eye contact.

'Oh come on, that's no excuse and you know it,' she retorted sharply. John knew that tone. It meant they were headed for an argument. That he had once again been found lacking, but he wasn't in the mood for being told off.

'I needed to be here for Sherlock,' he replied stubbornly.

'And I get that,' she said, her voice more gentle now. 'But I'm your wife, John. I'm carrying your child. You can't just shut me out like this.' She sounded vulnerable, as if she was trying to point out how much she needed him. But in the light of all of the recent revelations, John couldn't help wondering if he wasn't being manipulated. How would he know now? What was truth and what was just acting, a manipulative device to bring about a desired effect? How would he know when he was being played?

Not trusting himself to speak, for fear of the vitriol that might pour from his mouth, he sat in silence and stared at his hands wrapped around his coffee cup, and wondered why it couldn't all go back to being simple. When he was with Sherlock, he knew exactly what he wanted - for everything to go back to the way that it was before. Before Mary, before Sherlock had left, back to Baker Street and cases and God help him - eyeballs in the fridge. But when he was with Mary, it suddenly became less clear. He wanted to make a break with her, to tell her that it was over, to tell her he would help her support the child, but he couldn't. Because a part of him, the post-Sherlock John, the broken one, still loved her. And in moments like this he didn't know what he wanted, because the bottom line was he wanted to be both - Sherlock's John, and Mary's John, but the problem was, they were two almost entirely different people.

So it came to a choice, Sherlock or Mary. Mary or Sherlock. Mary who he had married; Mary who had seen him through the dark days when he had believed in Sherlock's death and in the emptiness that had followed; Mary who was carrying his child; Mary who had lied to him.

But hadn't Sherlock lied to him too? Time and again? And weren't his lies every bit as bad as Mary's? Mary may have lied about her past, but Sherlock had lied about the present - allowing him to believe that he was dead after that leap from Bart's roof. Not just for a few hours, or a few days, but for two whole years. He had allowed John to mourn for him, with no glimmer of hope. He had allowed him to lose his best friend, his home and his job, all in one massive lie, that John had nevertheless managed to forgive him for. If he had forgiven Sherlock, then shouldn't he at least try to forgive Mary too?

'So is this how it's going to be now?' Mary asked, when it became clear that John wasn't going to break the silence. 'Me only seeing you when Sherlock gives you permission? You refusing to speak to me?'

'Nobody has to give me 'permission',' John flashed back, his distress suddenly giving way to anger. 'And you told me that I didn't have to choose,' John reminded her.

'Maybe I was wrong,' Mary said, reaching for his hand across the table tentatively. 'Maybe I've realised that I don't want to share. Not if it's going to be like this.'

'What, you're jealous of Sherlock now?' John said, snatching his hand away. Anger was definitely winning now, despite all of John's best intentions. Exhaustion always gave way to anger in the end, all of that fury bubbling under the surface as it had since his return from Afghnaistan, always willing to break out when he let his defences down. 'Seriously? After everything that's happened you're begrudging me being there for him?'

'Should I be?'

John pushed his chair back, jaw tensed and shook his head at her slowly. 'You're unbelievable.' He leant forward to whisper, 'You nearly killed him, Mary. Twice. And what - you just want me to walk away from him and play happy families with you and the baby?'

'Please John, don't do this,' and he realised that there were tears in her eyes. She thought that she was losing him, and he couldn't tell her that she wasn't right.

'I can't leave him,' he said, his voice cracking now, as anger gave way to something deeper.

'I know. I know that you can't. And I know that I shouldn't ask you to.'

'He nearly died, Mary.'

'I know.'

'Twice.'

'Yes, you've already pointed that out.'

'He's my best friend.'

'Oh John,' Mary said, shaking her head at him, her eyes full of compassion.

'What?' he asked genuinely confused.

'Do you honestly think that is all that he is?'

'What are you saying?'

'I'm saying,' she said, reaching for his hand again, and this time he didn't pull away, although he didn't react either, just allowed her to put her hand over his where it lay on the table, like a dead thing. 'I'm saying, my darling John, that if you think what you feel for Sherlock is friendship then you're kidding yourself.'

He shook his head. 'I can't talk about this now,' he said.

'I came to tell you I've got a scan booked,' she said. 'The day after tomorrow at half ten. I thought you'd want to be there.'

'Mary -I'

'This is your child, John,' she said firmly. ' You need to decide if you want to be part of their life or not. Unless, of course, you've already made that decision. And if you have, then it would be kinder to just tell me now.'

'I haven't made any decisions, Mary.'

'But you admit that there's a decision that you have to make?'

And there was the anger again, overwhelming him, making him want to lash out out and destroy something, anything. Why couldn't she let it go? Why couldn't she accept that he couldn't think about this now? Why couldn't she just leave him alone?

He stood up and pushed his cup of coffee away. 'You know what? I can't do this now,' he said, aware that he was almost shouting. 'I can't sit here and have this conversation with you when Sherlock is lying upstairs in intensive care.'

'You didn't answer the question, John,' Mary said, looking up at him.

'I don't know!' John yelled at her, then realised that the entire canteen had gone silent and was staring at them. He held his hand up in apology. 'Sorry,' he said to the staring crowd, and waited, leaning on the table until the hum of chatter in the room had resumed once more.

'I don't know, Mary. That's the honest answer. I don't know how I feel about him and I don't know how I feel about you. I just know that I can't do this now. I'm tired, I've hardly slept in a week. I just need some time to think this through.'

'John, I -' she sounded apologetic now, aware that she had pushed him too far.

'I know, Mary, and I'm sorry. When I know what I want, I'll be in touch. Until then, just give me some space to work out what the hell is going on with my life.'

And blinking back tears, he turned and walked away from her without looking back.  
...........

Sherlock was asleep when he got back; of course he was. He had always used that as a way to escape awkward conversations. John sat there with him for several hours, and when he failed to wake up, eventually went back to the on-call room, packed a bag, and headed back to 221b to do some much needed laundry.

Mrs Hudson was still up when he let himself in through the street door and he found himself quickly relieved of his bag of washing, despite his protests that he could do it himself. Before he knew it, he was sitting at her kitchen table, drinking tea and eating custard creams, while he updated her on Sherlock's progress all to the comforting background hum of the washing machine.

He had always liked Mrs Hudson's kitchen. it spoke of comfort and of the days before Sherlock's leap off the roof. The day that had changed everything. If Sherlock hadn't crossed Moriarty, if he had found some other way to deal with the situation that he found himself in, then what would have happened then? Would John still have met Mary? Would he still have become involved with her? It seemed unlikely. He wouldn't have taken that long-term locum post at the surgery in Richmond that was for sure; he would have been running round London solving cases with Sherlock, doing the occasional locum shift to keep his registration up and nothing more.

If he hadn't been working at that surgery, would he have met Mary anyway? Would he have bumped into her in a bar or a cafe? Would fate have conspired to bring them together in different circumstances? And if it had, if Sherlock had still been there, if he hadn't thought that he was dead, would he have asked her out as he had, and would the pull that he had felt for her have been there? He didn't know, and just trying to work it out made him feel tired. He squeezed the bridge of his nose, trying to ward off the impending headache that was just starting to throb at his temples.

'Oh John, you look so tired,' Mrs Hudson was saying, and John realised he has no idea what she's been talking about for the last few minutes. 'Why don't you go upstairs and get some sleep? I'll finish your washing for you, and have it ready for you in the morning. I've put milk and a loaf of bread in the fridge for your and a few other bits and pieces for your breakfast, I knew you'd be back.'

'I might just do that,' John said yawning. 'Thank you Mrs H.'

'He's going to be okay, John - isn't he?' She asked, as John stood up and picked up his bag from where it waited in front of the washing machine. He had few clean clothes left, but he would need his wash bag and phone charger. He could always borrow one of Sherlock's old t-shirts to sleep in. It was an oddly comforting thought.

'I think so,' John nodded, smiling at her concern. 'He's got a way to go before he gets home, but he's well on his way now. He's awake and making sense, that's a big step forward.'

'Could I - maybe visit him do you think? Would he mind? I wouldn't want to intrude, but I'm fond of him you know. I missed him when he was gone.'

'I'll ask him,' John told her, unwilling to guess what Sherlock's response would be. 'But he'll be home in a few weeks anyway, and I'll tell him that you were asking about him.'

....

John's planned eight hours of uninterrupted sleep was broken bright and early by the jaunty ring of his mobile phone. He really needed to change it from that irritating ring tone that it always seemed to default to after updates.

He squinted at the screen. Withheld number - he glanced over at the alarm clock. 6.15am, who the hell would phone him this early? He nearly ignored it, but then reasoning it could be the hospital, he fought back the jolt of panic at what might have happened in his absence, picked it up and said, 'John Watson.'

'How is he?'

'What? Who is this?'

'Who do you think it is, Dr Watson. Now tell me how my brother is.'

'Mycroft,' John said with a groan, throwing himself back onto the mattress in annoyance, and rubbing his gritty eyes. 'Do you know what time it is?'

'You didn't answer my question.'

Mycroft's voice was terse, and John realised that he was hearing genuine concern. 'He's doing okay,' he told him. 'It was touch and go for a while, but it looks as if he's going to make it. He's awake and making sense. He's still on intensive care at The London, but they'll probably move him to High Dependency today.'

There was silence on the other end of the phone, as Mycroft took in the information. John could almost hear his relief.

'Where have you been, Mycroft?' he asked. 'They said they couldn't contact you, and I didn't know whether your parents should be told .'

'You didn't contact them, did you?' came the sharp reply.

'No, I didn't . They gave me the letter filed with Sherlock's solicitors. I followed the instructions in that. But he could have died, Mycroft. Surely they would have wanted to know?'

'We have an agreement, my brother and I,' Mycroft said. 'Our parents don't get involved if we're injured or missing. It's simpler that way. I'm on my way back to London. I'll see you at the hospital at about half two. I'll get a full update then.' Just as John realised that the background noise was that of an aeroplane in full flight, the phone clicked off, terminating the conversation.

Swearing, John threw his phone back onto the bedside table, convinced that he would never be able to get back to sleep, but exhaustion won over anger in the end, and when he next woke, bright sunlight was flooding though the gap in the curtains.

There was a clanking of pans coming from the kitchen downstairs, and he walked into the living room to the welcoming smell of frying bacon. 'I thought you could do with some breakfast before you went back to the hospital,' Mrs Hudson said from where she was standing at the stove. 'I've washed and ironed your clothes for you, and left them on Sherlock's bed to keep them tidy.

'Mrs Hudson, you're an angel,' John said, as he sat down at the table which was already laid for breakfast, pouring himself a cup of tea from the pot.

'You will stay here won't you, John?' she asked, 'While Sherlock is in hospital at least? And afterwards? He'll need someone to look after him for a bit, won't he? I don't like to think of him alone.'

'He'll have you to feed him up,' John told her with a smile. 'What else could he need?'

'It's not just about food and clean clothes though is it?' Mrs Hudson said, standing with her back to the cooker, hands holding onto the rail behind her, and John couldn't fail to feel as he was somehow being told off.

'We're just friends, Mrs H,' he said wearily, reaching for his tea.

'Pull the other one John, it's got bells on it,' she said disapprovingly, as she turned back to the bacon, putting it on the plate and adding a fried egg and tomatoes before slamming it down on the table in front of him.

'What's that meant to mean?' John asked as she added a full toast rack to the table, and sat down opposite him with her own cup of tea, obviously settling in for a meaningful chat.

'You know exactly what I mean, John Watson,' she said. 'You and Sherlock were never just friends. Oh, I don't care about what you did or didn't get up to behind that bedroom door,' she continued, holding up her hand to stop his protest. 'That's got nothing to do with it. There's sex without love and love without sex, and I don't know why people always assume the two have to go together.'

'You think that I love Sherlock?' John asked, genuinely stunned.

'Well of course, you do, John. I know love when I see it. And he certainly loves you.'

John froze, his fork halfway to his mouth, stunned into silence, 'He does?' He managed in a strangled whisper, wondering if Mrs H had taken too many of her herbal soothers that morning.

'He's a complicated one, that Sherlock Holmes. Doesn't find it easy to tell people how he feels. He'd do anything for you though John, you must know that. Now eat your breakfast before it gets cold.'

......

John walked into the intensive care unit later that morning with a degree of trepidation, disturbed by his conversation with Mrs Hudson, and wondering if Sherlock would be prepared to return to the topic that they'd been discussing the previous evening before they'd been so rudely interrupted. Wondering if he wanted to. He found Sherlock sitting up in bed, freshly shaved, looking a hundred times better than the near ghost of the last week, flicking through the screens on his phone with the speed of light.

'How did you get that?' John asked. The last time he had seen that phone it had been in Baker Street, on the night of Sherlock's collapse. He certainly hadn't moved it, so who had?

'I have my means, John,' Sherlock said, without looking up, 'Did you know that Magnussen has taken over another newspaper? That man needs to be stopped.'

'But not by you,' John said, taking the phone out of Sherlock's hands, leaving him staring at empty space. 'Did you get Billy to get that for you? When for heaven's sake? You've only been conscious for the last fifteen hours and I was in Baker Street for most of that time.'

'So I hear. Mrs Hudson does like to chat, doesn't she?'

John groaned. 'You sent Billy round to get it last night while I was updating Mrs Hudson.'

'Well deduced, John. I'm impressed.'

'Good to see you haven't lost any of your sarcasm.'

'No, just everything else.' Sherlock said, glancing around at the many tubes and wires with a grimace.

'Not a fan of the bed bath?' John asked with a grin.

'It's not funny, John.'

'No, I know, but I for one are very pleased that you're finally aware enough to complain about it.'

  
He put down the chart he'd been look at and threw himself into the chair. 'Have the doctors been round yet?'

'It's eleven o'clock, John. Of course they've been round.'

'And?'

'And apparently I'm lucky to be alive - why do people keep feeling the need to tell me that?'

'Maybe because it's true?'

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

'And maybe because they're hoping you might behave like a sensible human being for once and stop running around London trying to kill yourself?'

'I wasn't trying to kill myself,' Sherlock said indignantly, 'I was trying to -'

'To show me the truth about Mary, yes I know,' John said with a sigh.

'Did you talk to her?'

'Briefly.'

'And?'

'And I've told her I need some space to think things through.'

'You've had a week, John.'

'Why are you so bothered?' John asked, fighting to restrain his anger yet again. 'Why are you so dead set on me staying with Mary after all that she's done?'  
'Because you need her.'

'I -,' John hesitated and shook his head. 'No, Sherlock. I don't need someone who is going to lie to me like that.'

'But it's purely logical, surely. Mary -'

'Don't,' John said, looking up, and finding his eyes locked with Sherlock with an uncomfortable intensity. 'Just don't. It isn't logical at all. You, of all people, should know that.'

It was John who looked away first, of course it was. 'Mycroft's coming to see you later, by the way,' he said lightly, trying to break the atmosphere in the room.

'He's back?'

'What you mean you haven't deduced that? You are slipping. He phoned me from the plane this morning. Wanted to know how you were.'

'Wanted to know if I was still alive you mean. What sort of plane was it?'

'How the hell would I know.'

'Quality of the engine noise, John. Have you learnt nothing?'

'Obviously not,' John murmured, marvelling at how quickly they fell back into their old pattern, and wishing desperately that he could find a way to return to the quiet intimacy of their conversation the previous evening. They were interrupted yet again by a knock at the door, but instead of Mary, this time there was a nurse there with a porter.

'Ready to go?' she asked Sherlock.

'Go where?' John asked.

'Echo, apparently. To look at my errant heart valve,' Sherlock replied.

'Can I go with him?' John asked the nurse as the brakes were clicked off the bed, and the portable monitor was unhooked and attached.

'It will be boring,' Sherlock said. 'Go and get yourself a cup of coffee John, you look as if you need it.'

And so John was left standing in an empty room as Sherlock was wheeled away from him, having apparently been dismissed. After all of the hours that he had spent in this room keeping watch over Sherlock, sometimes feeling as if he was keeping him alive by the strength of his will alone, discovering that he was suddenly surplus to requirements was an uncomfortable sensation.

The message was clear - Sherlock didn't want John seeing the echo, didn't want him to know what it showed. He was shutting him out, and the door that had been so enticingly ajar the previous evening had been slammed firmly shut. Normal service had been resumed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be the last chapter for a while, so I'm hoping this mega chapter might compensate for that a little. I'm not finished with his story, not by a long shot, but life is getting in the way a bit at the moment. So thank you for all the comments - please keep them coming, and I'll be back when I can...
> 
> Thanks as ever go to my fantastic beta team of J_Baillier and 7percent solution.


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